Category: Desserts

Irma’s Swedish Rice Pudding

If you have ever been invited to a Smörgåsbord, you might have had the opportunity to enjoy one of the culinary triumphs of Scandinavia—Swedish Rice Pudding. It was often made for dessert when the housewife had rice left over from dinner the day before. A dessert made with leftover rice may seem a little pedestrian, but it is is just one of many classic comfort foods that use ingredients saved from earlier meals.

Bread puddings are a good example. The best versions are made with stale bread. Of course, there are savory dishes in this category as well. Sauces, soups and casseroles frequently call for stock or broth made by simmering that ham or beef bone or turkey carcass left over from Sunday dinner. We should also remember that the Thanksgiving turkey should be stuffed with dressing made with bread that is at least a couple of days old. The bags of dried croutons at the supermarket are paltry imitations of bread that has been allowed to develop its full flavor in your kitchen.

Like my mother, Irma often made her pudding with leftover rice, and it was delicious. We may have tasted it at one of the Smörgåsbords at the First Lutheran Church in New Richmond, but Irma also served it to us in her home. When I asked our friend Anne about her mother’s rice pudding, she told me she was pretty sure that it was her grandmother’s recipe. Anne’s grandmother died before she was born, but her mother was proud of the Swedish customs and recipes she had inherited. She contributed her Swedish Rice Pudding recipe to the New Richmond First Lutheran Church Cook Book.

When I asked Anne if she had any tips for me about how to make the pudding taste as good as her mother’s, she said, “Whisk the eggs until they are nice and yellow and use whole milk. Oh, the rice should be cold.”

While we were talking I had the church cookbook open to the recipe, so I replied, “The recipe says to drain the rice and blanch it in cold water.”

She hesitated and cleared her throat. “She used leftover rice, didn’t she?” I asked.

“Well, yes, most of the time,” confessed Anne. One of the secret ingredients of Swedish Rice Pudding is now known, so cook extra rice when you are making dinner. Your family will bless you on the morrow.

INGREDIENTS:

For the rice:
1/2 cup rice
1 cup cold water
Dash of salt

For the custard:
5 large eggs
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
4 cups milk
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup raisins

PROCEDURE:

Bring the rice, water and salt to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer the rice until the water is absorbed, about twelve minutes. Rinse the rice with cold water in a colander and set it aside.

Preheat the oven to 350º and grease a three quart casserole. You could also begin heating some water.

Whisk the eggs in a mixing bowl until they are lemon yellow. Combine the sugar, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg in a small bowl and whisk these dry ingredients into the eggs. Stir in the milk and vanilla, then stir in the rice and raisins.

Pour the mixture into the casserole and put the pan on a center shelf in the oven. Pour about an inch of hot water into the pan and bake the pudding for one and a half to two hours. Using a fork, gently stir the pudding after thirty minutes to distribute the rice, raisins and cinnamon in the pudding.

After ninety minutes, test for doneness with a table knife. If it comes out clean, the pudding is done. If not, let it continue to bake for a few minutes and test again. You can serve it warm or cold.

NOTES: If you, like us, usually have only one or two percent milk in the refrigerator, you can fortify the milk with some half and half or cream. I use three fourths cup of half and half with three and a quarter cups of one percent milk. I haven’t tried it, but adding a couple tablespoons of melted butter would probably also work.

There are nine different recipes for rice pudding in the First Lutheran Church Cook Book. That number tells me that there must be thousands of different recipes for this dessert just in Wisconsin. I know that my mother made one similar to Irma’s baked in the oven, but she also made a simple version with leftover rice, milk, eggs and sugar that she cooked in a saucepan. I will try to find that recipe, as that pudding tasted pretty good too and doesn’t take as long to cook.

Irma’s Swedish Rice Pudding tastes great made with rice cooked as above and even better with leftover rice! Trust Irma! And my mother!

Rich’s Dropped Scones

I ate my first scone in either Oxford or Cambridge, England, with a cup of tea like a proper English gentleman. It was the summer of 1966, and I was enjoying a short vacation after my year of studies in Germany. Jerri and her friend Marilyn met me in London, and we spent time together in London, Oxford and Cambridge.

The Bodleian Library at Oxford and the University Library at Cambridge let me use their rare book rooms for a day while Jerri and Marilyn toured the cities. I think it fair to say that we liked Cambridge better than Oxford. Cambridge had more green space, which appealed to us midwesterners. We ate picnic lunches in the shade on the green and watched the crews practice on the Cam.

We thought that it was quaintly English to have horses grazing freely on the green among students and visitors until a large brown animal grabbed Jerri’s lunch bag and proceeded to eat her banana. Jerri was not the only victim. We learned from other picnickers with mangled lunch bags that the horses also liked apples and oranges.

I am not certain how the horses opened the lunch bags. I think that they just grabbed the bags in their big horsey teeth and smashed them on the ground until they found whatever it was that smelled good. A student explained that the horses would not take the bag from your hands, so our sandwiches survived our second day on the green as we traded stares with several hungry horses trying to catch us off guard.

Cambridge sticks in my memory for another reason. Finding a place to stay was a challenge. All the hotels were full, but the tourist information office helped us locate a room in a private bed and breakfast. I was traveling with two attractive young women, and our landlady, Mrs. Chillingsworth, almost refused to rent to the three of us. She looked like a character from a Dickens novel with a cold, suspicious eye and clearly suspected that we were hippies planning an orgy. We pleaded, and she finally relented after I promised to sleep on the floor.

The ladies went to bed. I went out to a pub filled with students who welcomed their “cousin” from the “colonies” and approved of my taste for two pints of bitter before I walked back to Mrs. Chillingsworth’s where I collapsed on the carpet.

Every afternoon we had tea and scones. The tea was strong, the cream was real and the scones were delicious. In the past fifty years, scones have become popular around the world. You can even buy them in New Richmond. A search on the Internet for “scone recipes” brings up over 100,000 pages, which tells me that lots of people are also making these biscuits or cakes at home today.

Our friend Rich likes them and decided he would make his own. He took ideas from several recipes he found on the Web to come up with his version. He uses 2% milk instead of cream to make a soft dough, adds dried cherries and drops the dough on a cookie sheet as if he were making dropped baking powder biscuits. His scones are tender and delicious. Here is how to make them.

INGREDIENTS:

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 T baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup (8 T) unsalted butter
1/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup milk
1/3 cup dried cherries

PROCEDURE:

Preheat the oven to 400º. Blend the flour, baking powder and salt in a large mixing bowl. Chop the butter into small pieces and mix them with the flour. Use a pastry blender or your fingers to cut the butter into the flour until it looks like coarse cornmeal.

Use a fork to blend the sugar with the flour and then stir in the milk until you have a stiff dough. Fold in the cherries. Be careful not to stir the dough too much.

Using a tablespoon and fork, drop eight or nine globs of dough on an ungreased cookie sheet. Shape the globs if necessary so they look nice to you. Sprinkle the scones with a little sugar and bake them about fifteen minutes or until they turn lightly brown.

NOTES: If you are using salted butter, use only a quarter teaspoon of salt. You can substitute currants, dried cranberries or raisins for the dried cherries but I strongly recommend the cherries. Rich uses 2% milk while I use 1%, but both make scones that are tender and delicious.