In Good Company: Rice Pud
...Today when meals can be prepared so quickly a slow-oven seems a luxury. Instant dinners are convenient but that long-simmering, mouth-watering period beforehand which stimulates young appetites to fever pitch is cut out also...
Enid Blackburn makes rice pud the old-fashioned way.
Did something today, I’m ashamed to say, I haven’t done for ages – made a rice pudding without using a tin opener. With great effort I threw a handful of rice into an earthenware dish, softened it in the oven with a covering of water, added a pinta and a grating of nutmeg, and two hours later that delicious smell of ambrosial perfection was pervading our kitchen.
It transported me back to my courting days when my husband’s brothers and sister were fighting for the right to ‘scrape’ the last remains from the family pudding tin.
Today when meals can be prepared so quickly a slow-oven seems a luxury. Instant dinners are convenient but that long-simmering, mouth-watering period beforehand which stimulates young appetites to fever pitch is cut out also. When roast beef and Yorkshire pud are frizzling in the oven the ‘How long before dinner?’ starts straight after breakfast. Even the dog sits guarding the oven door.
The sounds and smells of something bubbling in the oven, cake tins crammed with home baking, fill me with content. I suppose it’s a fall out from the war years, when our staple diet was stew. I can stomach my own stews, but other peoples’ always bring to mind the C Fox Smith army poem:
‘If you’ve lost your ‘aversack, your kit bag or your pipe,
Your ‘ousewife, soap or oily rag with which you clean your pipe,
Your belt or second pair o’ socks, your lanyard or pull-through,
Oh do not be dispirited – you’ll get ‘em in the stew!’
In those days reconstituteds all had the same flavour. Will anyone ever forget that sulphur-like taste peculiar to dried eggs? Then, one had no choice - now when fresh food is in abundance everywhere, supermarkets are doing a boom on dehydrated meals in a packet. With a drop of water you can reach hitherto unconquered heights of culinary sophistication. An enriched sauce can transform a roast beyond all recognition.
Sunday dinner with full family presiding is the event of our week. Our large dining table fully extended never seems big enough now they are older. Yet our standards appear frugal compared with Sunday lunch for two, Samuel Pepys style. His 1662 diary records ‘a fricasse of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, lamprey pie, a dish of anchovies and good wine of several sorts,’ with bicarb to follow I presume.
Most households have tasty supper standbys that rarely come from a packet. One gardener tells me they often enjoy a cauliflower cheese supper – in season. A daughter’s quickie – by the time she’s gone back to close the door, dashes to the toilet, thrown her jacket on the floor, it’s cooked – is a savoury omelette. My late night passion is garlic bread.
I discovered a tasty quickie when I spent an evening perming a stranger’s hair once. My mother has this habit of never saying ‘No.’ ‘Yes, my daughter would love to,’ is her stock phrase. Due to this trait and the invention of home-perms, I was at one point reluctantly putting our local hairdresser out of business. She had met this woman on a bus who was desperate to be curly before morning. With an address but no name I finally unearthed the living image of Tessie O’Shea, without the giggle.
‘Come in love, take no notice of them,’ she told me, flicking her bleached tendrils behind her ear rings. ‘Them’ were two large sons and a small, moody husband. ‘He doesn’t like the idea,’ she pointed to her husband glowering behind a paper. That made two of us. Watched by ‘Them’ and feeling like a TV brain surgeon, I attacked her locks. Amid encouraging comments like ‘What a stink’ and Is it safe?’ I surreptitiously covered the white burn on the dark polished table, where some solution had dribbled, and battled on prayerfully.
‘Stop gawping and make some supper’ one lad was persuaded, with the aid of a sharp kick, as I wound up the last curler and thought of a suitable antidote for baldness. Soon there was a distinct aura of fried onions mingling with the acrid stench of ammonia and we were all sat munching the most delicious fried onion teacakes I have ever tasted. The sort that makes your hair curl! Thankfully hers did.
