Rice Pudding: the Story

The world is covered in rice puddings, made from many different rices and with a wide variety of flavourings. The northern European tradition of rice puddings is strongly bound to cold weather and home fare, and the puddings are frequently served with cream, fruit or fruit purees. In countries such as Spain and Portugal, arroz doce (sweet rice) is a ubiquitous restaurant dessert served cool and unadorned in shallow dishes. Greek rizogalo (milk rice) is usually decorated with ground cinnamon and sometimes flavoured with lemon, while the puddings of the Middle East and southern Asia often contain ingredients such as almonds, pistachios, raisins, cardamom and rosewater (think Indian kheer and Lebanese riz bi haleeb). In South-East Asia, particularly Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam, desserts are made with a variety of rices, or rice flour, and coconut milk, sometimes with the addition of thickeners or crushed beans. Some rice puddings are steamed but most are cooked on the stovetop, a quicker but more demanding method than that used for the traditional Anglo pudding, which spends most or all of its time lazing in the oven. Things can't get simpler than this: take equal weights of sugar and short-grain rice, add an unbelievable quantity of milk, flavour it and bake at 150C for a boringly long time. Easy. Unless you forget about it in your boredom, or realise that you didn't cleverly stock up on short-grain rice before it went out of fashion and ceased to be sold in supermarkets, thus torpedoing the entire operation. I don't mean stubby medium-grain varieties such as arborio or carnaroli or nishiki. I mean short-grain pudding rice. Look in any vaguely dusty cookbook and it will call for pudding rice or round rice or short-grain rice. Look on your supermarket shelves and there's no such thing. The SunRice website clearly states that Australia produces a short-grain rice. I wrote to them. They wrote back - and very helpfully. It seems many of our mothers and grandmothers lived a lie. They didn't cook with real short-grain rice, but with medium-grain rice that wasn't labelled as such. It's only in recent years, with the burgeoning variety of rices available, that the same rice has been labelled medium-grain. SunRice's short-grain rice is a Japanese variety. Hmmm. What to do? In chilly England they can still buy something called pudding rice. So, just as "good food" appears to mean quite different things in England and Australia, so must our rice puddings have diverged long ago without any of us realising. To examine the seriousness of the difference, I commissioned an unsuspecting friend holidaying in Britain to bring back some pudding rice. Unlike him, I'm sure readers will be thrilled and relieved to know that the grains of British pudding rice (product of Italy) are indeed a little smaller than our rices, but the difference when cooking seems negligible. Phew. The rest of the world uses rices to which we have access here. Most of southern Europe uses local medium-grain varieties such as arborio, carnaroli and calasparra. Around the Mediterranean, short-medium grain varieties are usually preferred, but many cooks will use whatever rice happens to be in the kitchen. We are also lucky here in being able to get most of the rices used throughout Asia, be they long or short-grain varieties, glutinous or non-glutinous. Long-grain rices result in an acceptable pudding but usually lack the sticky softness other rices develop, so are often used for runnier puddings such as kheer. Non-Anglo puddings have long been a fixture of restaurants serving local migrant communities, but it appears rice puddings are now verging on trendiness. In New York, Rice to Riches, a rice pudding restaurant (actually more like a bar) recently opened to somewhat mixed reviews. Perhaps unsurprisingly, its puddings come in a multitude of flavours and are laden with sugar and cream. Closer to home, a few fancier restaurants have started offering puddings, usually with Asian flavours. Ezard at Adelphi has a rice pudding made with palm sugar, coconut and lime, and Joseph's at The Mansion Hotel has one with spiced pineapple. Source: theage.com