White-Pot: 1615

If you’ve looked out of a window lately you could be forgiven for thinking we’ve jumped forward several months to the start of drizzly autumn. Where I live we’ve had thunderstorms and the mass reappearance of winter coats as people stand outside shivering, waiting to be called into the shop so they can buy ice lollies they’ll seemingly never get to use in defiance of this most wintry of Junes.

It was time for a bit of comfort food. It will surprise approximately none of you to learn I have strong feelings on what counts as comfort food. Roast dinners, mashed potato, pasta: yes. Soup, anything with fruit, herbal tea: no. Why would anyone ever think those things counted?

Rice pudding is an emphatically comforting treat. Creamy, indulgent, adaptable without ever betraying the fundamental principles that make it so good; it is everything I needed to beat the dreariness of last week’s weather.

I knew that rice pudding-y things had been around for centuries in various forms; the ancient Romans used rice pottage as a dish to settle upset stomachs and there are several medieval recipes for boiled rice mixed with almond milk which might then be served sweetened or unsweetened. Archaeologists have even found evidence that a sticky rice, sugar and, er, blood mixture was used as mortar on 2000 year old buildings. Not comforting, as such, but interesting!

Interesting or not, I was still in need of comfort food and I was fairly sure there had to exist a historical rice pudding that fell somewhere between ‘pap for invalids’ and ‘tough enough to hold walls up’. And then I found it: white-pot.

Not the most comforting name I’ll admit. White-pot was clearly named after its appearance and an early appearance of it as a sweet dish rather than an ambiguous pottage is in Gervase Markham’s The English Huswife. It followed in the footsteps of medieval recipes for blancmanger – literally white food – which were simple, mild, pale dishes. A couple of versions of blancmanger in the 14th century cookbook Forme of Cury contained rice, while other blancmanger dishes might not contain any rice at all and resembled something akin to the modern dish blancmange.

Rice was a relatively luxurious ingredient in England until fairly recently thanks to the fact it was difficult to grow and had to be imported and so the recipe in English Huswife wasn’t intended to be eaten by the ‘ordinary folk’.

There’s a lot of debate about whether rice was first cultivated in China or India – since I don’t know anything at all about this particular part of history, I’m not going to elaborate too much on it but you can check the argument out here. What is known is that despite its ancient Asian origins, by the late middle ages rice was also being grown in some European countries such as Portugal, Italy and France.

Markham’s white-pot recipe seemed deceptively simple and delicious which fitted the first two of my criteria for comfort food. It was a good start. There were no quantities given so I adapted the recipe as I saw fit to make enough to feed a family of 3.

First I mixed 400ml of double cream with a dessert spoon of sugar, half a teaspoon of rosewater and one cinnamon stick and heated it all in a pan until it began to simmer. I then turned the heat off and left it until it was totally cooled and the cinnamon had had time to infuse. Once this had happened, I added 100g of arborio rice to the cream. This type of short grain rice most closely matched the type that was imported from Europe to England during the 16th and 17th centuries and had better properties for a dessert dish than long grain rice. Also, I wanted to make risotto for dinner.

I then added two egg yolks and the white of one egg, 50g of currants, another dessert spoon of sugar, a pinch of ground cinnamon and a pinch of salt. It went into an oven proof dish and baked for just under two hours. Just before this point I hesitated: technically the presence of currants meant this meal belonged to the “anything with fruit” genre, which I’ve already explained doesn’t count as comfort food, but I figured the overwhelming quantity of cream balanced out any health benefits from the currants, so continued.

After a couple of hours the white-pot was done. The house smelled amazing – like hot milk and spices – and as the rain poured down the windows I really forgot we were half way though the first month of summer. I quickly portioned the pudding into three bowls and presented it to my husband and daughter, who had been clustered round the oven for the past ten minutes (I had assumed it was because my cooking smelled so good, but my husband later told me it was just because it was the warmest place in the house.)

Overall, this was pretty good. It was surprisingly dark given its name but was by far the richest rice pudding I’d ever tasted, thanks to the fact it was basically just eggs and cream. I found that a normal sized bowl was a bit too much in this case and I’m still trying to work out if that means it was the perfect example of comfort food or if it went a bit too far…

In terms of taste, it was much more fragrant than modern puds; the Tudors loved an opportunity to use rosewater and the old adage ‘a little goes a long way’ directly originates from 16th and 17th century cooks’ overzealous use of it.* The currants gave a mellow fruity sweetness like a sort of Tudor precursor to huge dollops of jam, and it mingled well with the cinnamon throughout.

It was also very thick – the ratio of rice to cream may have been slightly off so I’ve upped the liquid in the recipe below. I don’t mind really thick rice pudding but my husband and daughter overruled me and suggested others might not share my obviously superior stodge preferences.

Anyway, it looks like we’re in for some good weather soon which means I’ll probably end up bowing to peer pressure and go back to eating salads and other *summery food* this time next week (let’s just pretend for the sake of this bit that I’d eat things like that, okay?) But even if that’s what the future hold for me, I’m glad I got the chance to have one final comfort food blowout.

E x

*Nope.

White-Pot

400ml double cream
300ml whole milk
100g pudding rice
3 dessert spoons of sugar
1 cinnamon stick
2 egg yolks and 1 egg white
Half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon
Half a teaspoon of rosewater
50g currants

1. Add the milk, cream, 1 dessert spoon of sugar, the rose water and the cinnamon stick to a pan and bring to a simmer.
2. Turn off the heat and leave to cool entirely.
3. When totally cold, remove the cinnamon stick.
4. Add the egg yolks and white, the pudding rice, the currants, the rest of the sugar and the ground cinnamon to the mixture and fully incorporate.
5. Transfer to a buttered oven proof dish and bake at 160 degrees for about two hours. Check on the pudding regularly to check the top isn’t burning and cover with foil if so.