RECIPE: coconut rice pudding

One of my all-time favourite cookbooks remains a weird, skinny little book called Endangered Recipes, compiled by unknown (to me) Lori Robling.

Containing odd, mongrel home-style dishes from all manner of Americans - from redneck to more recent immigrants such as Koreans - it contains joys such as Crockpot Apple Butter, Cement Cake and Pensacola Gaspachee Salad.

It also contains this wonderful, addictive rice and coconut pudding; the only recipe I've found which competes with the English three-hour pudding I've made almost my entire cooking life.

This quasi-Puerto Rican rice pudding is slightly trashy, but very easy if you have a kitchen companion to stop stirring boredom.

Here's how to make it:

Serves: 6

Ingredients:

1 cup long grain rice

3 cups milk

350ml evaporated milk

440ml can coconut cream

1/8 tsp salt

Method:

1) In a medium saucepan, soak rice in the milk for 2 hours.

2) Add the evaporated milk, coconut and salt. Bring to the boil, stirring all the while.

3) Reduce heat and simmer, stirring only now and then to stop rice forming clumps. In 45 minutes the mix should look like loose oat porridge.

4) Eat hot or cold, sprinkled with much cinnamon. If you plan to eat it cold, spread the rice into a large dish, then, when cold, sprinkle with a little more sugar and caramelise under grill or with blowtorch, so what you have is rice pudding brulee.

 

• This article was originally published in The Times.