Rice Pudding with Stewed Fruit – Comfort Food

Rice pudding with stewed fruit is an old-fashioned comfort food that uses your fruit-tree harvest. Whatever fruit doesn’t make it into a jam or canning jar is game for stewing. Drop fruits like plums, apricots or cherries whole or halved into boiling water and cooked until tender. Add sugar, cook a bit more and then ladle over a just-baked, warm rice-milk pudding. This dish is at the top of the Celtic comfort food pyramid.

Flashback to 1979: I learn to make and enjoy rice pudding with stewed fruit in 1979 at Finlaystone in the large, ancient kitchen. We serve it as dessert most days to our hard-laboring staff along with the largest meal of the day: lunch.

Nostalgia Bake, English Style

We prepare it using the English-style bottled milk with cream on the top, 2 pints, a handful of rice and some sugar. Then place the pudding a couple hours before lunch into the “slow oven” of the Esse coal-burning stove. When it is ready, we pull it from the oven and place it on a trivet on the wooden tea trolley along with the stewed fruit, and the rest of lunch. Drive the trolley down to the dining room, right at noon, no later, through its 3-foot-thick doorway. Enter the great dining room with an oversized fireplace and the trolley becomes the buffet station in the room. We serve the food around to each person seated at the large table, dish by dish, until all the sometimes 8 to to 10 and sometimes more plates are filled. Then the eating commences.

After the meal, but before the cheese and biscuits are passed around the table, the rice pudding is served with stewed fruit: the highlight of the meal.

Note…

A couple of caveats: use whole milk to get the esteemed brown skin to form on the top of the rice pudding. Another tip is to stone the plums, cherries, apricots or core the apples that you are using so that you don’t bite into the pits and seeds as you eat your pudding.

Below is Mrs. Beeton’s Victorian-era recipe for baked rice pudding and a stewed fruit recipe from The Joy of Cooking. For our busy, modern lives, rice pudding with stewed fruit might be more of a Sunday afternoon meal preparation than a lunch dish. You can prepare it quickly to bake for a couple hours along with a turkey or roast in the oven.

Baked Rice Pudding

Serves 3 to 4 persons

Ingredients – 1 pint of milk, 3 tablespoonfuls of rice, 1 1/2 tablespoonfuls of sugar, salt, nutmeg. Method – Pick and wash the rice, place in a greased pie-dish. Add the sugar, milk and a small pinch of salt. Sprinkle the surface with nutmeg, and bake in a slow oven (325 F) for about 2 hours. Note – Skim milk and a 1/2 oz. butter, or a level tablespoonful of chopped suet may be used instead of the milk.

Stewed Fruit

Makes several cups

Use whole or cut into halves and if necessary remove the seeds from: 4 cups of fruit such as plums, blueberries, apples, apricots or cherries. You may prick the fruit before dropping it into: 1 to 1 1/2 cups boiling water. Reduce heat at once and simmer until nearly tender (about 15 minutes). Add: 1/2 to 1 cup of sugar, depending on the tartness desired. Cook another 15 to 20 minutes until thickened.