Uncomfortable times call for comfort food. This winter, from restaurants to supermarkets and even social media, rice pudding is having a moment.
Sales of rice pudding are up at all the main food chains including 45% year on year at Aldi and 49% month-on-month at Ocado. Waitrose meanwhile reports a 54% increase in searches for tinned versions, while recipe searches are up 233%.
“I’m not surprised,” says Jeremy Lee, the head chef at Quo Vadis in London, who likes to top his with ice-cold milk and a dollop of raspberry jam. “It’s like a quick spoonful of central heating. It’s warming, soothing and delicious.”
“It’s a very evocative pudding” says Jonathan Woolway, the chef director of St John. “Now more than ever people want dishes that are familiar. Rice pudding ticks all the boxes. It’s nostalgic and comforting.”
Over summer, he served a cold version with custard and brandy prunes but now with the arrival of the colder months it is back to a traditional baked version he grew up eating in Swansea with a dollop of jam on top.
Though rice pudding is derided by anyone forced to eat it at school, and often seen as the most humble of British puds, Regula Ysewijn, a culinary author, says this was not always the case.
“In the early days it was something that would only grace the tables of nobility. Rice was expensive and being able to cook it into a pudding was a privilege of people actually having a kitchen, which was very rare at that time.”
Fast forward to 2022 and it is a sentiment that is beginning to sound familiar once again. Rice was recently one of the budget foods the Office for National Statistics highlighted as increasing in price at a much faster rate than general inflation. The prices of milk and butter are also soaring.
Frugal cooks suggest any store cupboard rice can be used and the butter dropped, if necessary. Lee prefers to use arborio rice, explaining carnaroli is too nutty. Woolway is a fan of more affordable pudding rice: “It’s a short grain so the outside breaks down quickly. As it expands it takes on all the goodness in the dish, it’s the only one for the job really.”
Over at the hip Cafe Cecilia in Hackney, east London, the chef Max Rocha also champions a white pudding rice. He prefers to make his version on the stove top rather than baking it. Featuring egg yolk, sugar, double cream, milk and a bay leaf (“key to a good rice pudding”) he serves it with a marmalade ice cream on top.
“During lockdown I ate a lot of Ambrosia rice pudding from the corner shop. I used to get the plain one in the steel can and have it with Häagen-Dazs cookies and cream. The hot and cold go really well together. It’s just really comforting,” he says.
In an unlikely shift, vegan versions featuring coconut and almond milks and toppings such as pistachios and edible flowers are popping up too. There is even a dedicated rice pudding shop in New York called Rice to Riches, where flavours include tiramisu and cheesecake.
Will Devlin, the chef owner of Birchwood in East Sussex, has started making his version with barley instead of rice. “The flavour is nuttier and it’s a British product,” he says.
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Some consumers are embracing ready-made versions that can either be eaten cold or quickly heated up in a microwave rather than using the oven. At Aldi a packet of six chilled pots for £2.25 are proving most popular, while tinned versions start from 75p at Waitrose.
The first recipe for rice pudding in Britain appeared in The Forme of Cury, a 14th-century collection of medieval recipes written by the master cooks of King Richard II, thought to be the oldest known instructive cookery book written in the English language.
The recipe did not contain sugar but Ysewijn explains that it would have been considered almost saccharine to people of the time. “If you analyse the flavour of rice, it’s not salty, it has a mellow taste. People in the past would have considered that sweet. They also would have added spices, which gave it another sweet kick.”
Ysewijn also highlights that it was not served as a specific dessert. “[in Victorian times] it was easy on the stomach so they gave it to invalids too,” she says, while in the middle ages, it was even eaten for breakfast.
Proof that in culinary history, some things never change. “The Victorians made it widely popular when they served it as nursery food – but they made it so plain, it was almost boring.”