A recipe for disappointment

Today I share a recipe for rice pudding, and suggestions for making your own vanilla sugar and extract, perfect rainy day activities.

Orange and cardamom rice pudding.

Introducing people you love to your new home is a little like introducing them to your new husband. You want it to go smoothly. You want them to see your beloved place, your beloved person, just as you do. You want them to see why you hitched your star to this particular wagon. You don’t want anyone to be muttering, “I give it a year” under their breath while you turn your back to fix the drinks.

This week, my nephew Angus and his girlfriend Olivia are visiting us from their home in Lund, an old university town in the southern tip of Sweden. We have planned dinners and drinks and excursions to local villages, walks around the lagoon and trips to museums and brocantes. And of course, I was looking forward to walking round Marseillan’s Tuesday market with them.

Angus and Olivia in Pezenas.

Market day, as you may have noticed, is my favourite day of the week. Wheeling my wicker chariot de courses around the village takes longer each week as we get to know more people. The waiter in the Marine Bar knows our order (un crème, un café allongé - a white coffee and a long black coffee). The man on the chicken stall knows I prefer medium eggs and the man on the cheese stall lifts the wheel of Comté out of the display cabinet almost as soon as he sees me coming.

Yesterday morning, I opened the shutters and the sky was leaden, the water in the harbour a sheet of heavy grey. It had rained all night. I took it as a personal affront that in this corner of France, which boasts so frequently in tourist brochures and estate agents’ details of having 300 days of sunshine a year, it chose my Designated Day of Showing Off to nourish the vines. No point in going to the market today. It would be much depleted – of stalls, of people.

We stayed home and read and drank coffee and chatted and caught up after long months apart. I made rice pudding as a consolation prize for the absence of an outing. Talking about Sweden with Olivia made me nostalgic for Fabrique, the Swedish bakery we used to visit every Sunday after Columbia Road flower market, to pick up cardamom buns. I added a good pinch of cardamom to the rice, along with some orange zest and a sticky vanilla pod.

I am always struck, whenever I make rice pudding, that short-grain rice is the anti-spinach. You know a wheelbarrow of spinach, when cooked, will produce just about enough to keep an abstemious mouse alive? I simply never believe, as I tip it into the steaming milk, that that will be enough rice. Will it? Surely not? Only about 100g in a litre of milk, or a mixture of milk and cream? For six people? Perhaps six mice…

But it is enough. On a grey-skied, indoor sort of day, it is precisely enough to bring contentment, happiness even. No showing off required.

The Luggy Basket in the wild. Photo © Clara Molden

Rice pudding with orange and cardamom

Serves 4-6

700ml whole milk
300ml double cream
50g caster sugar or vanilla sugar
1 vanilla pod* (see TIP below)
1 strip orange zest from an unwaxed orange, about 2cm by 6cm, carefully pared with a sharp vegetable peeler, any white pith removed
¼ tsp ground cardamom
A pinch of salt
100g round pudding rice

In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, warm together the milk, cream and sugar over a low heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Split the vanilla pod with a small, sharp knife, scrape out the seeds and add the sticky seeds to the warm milk along with the split pod. Add the orange zest, cardamom and salt.

Tip the rice into the pan, bring to the barest of simmers, and cook it gently, over a very low heat, stirring frequently for about 45 minutes until the rice is tender and creamy. It should still be quite soupy – it will thicken up as it cools. Remove from the heat and fish out the vanilla pod and orange zest.

I can’t deny, you have to keep an eye on the rice pudding, which is very easy if you’re pottering about in the kitchen anyway, but not so easy if you’re not. In this case, you can cook it in the oven. Heat the oven to 150C/130C Fan/Gas 2, bring the rice pudding to a simmer and cook for a few minutes on the hob before transferring it to a lightly butter an ovenproof dish. Bake, uncovered, for 2 hours.

Serve at room temperature or cold. It will keep, covered, in the fridge for a couple of days.

*TIP Make your own vanilla sugar and vanilla extract
When you’ve fished the vanilla pod out of the rice pudding, rinse it and put it on a piece of kitchen paper to dry. Then either put it in a jar of sugar to create vanilla sugar, or into a jar with some vodka to create vanilla extract. For the sugar, after a week or so the sugar will have taken on the beautiful aroma of the pod; with the extract, you will need to be more patient, it will take at least a couple of months. I have had jars of both going on for years. Vanilla is so expensive now, it’s impossible for me to see it as a one-use ingredient.