Century’s Old Creamy Rice Pudding & A One-Room Montana Schoolhouse

I’m really starting to feel like Alice from the Alice in Wonderland books. These research rabbit holes I keep falling into are starting to get deep! One seemingly innocent rice pudding recipe recently turned into hours of sifting through online historical newspapers and digital archives.

Many years ago, my Great-Grandmother typed three binders like the one below. In its duck-taped covers lay a series of yellowed, stained pages containing numerous typed recipes, quips, quotes and stories from her turn of the 20th Century childhood in rural western Wisconsin. Her elegant writing shares additional receipts for cookies, cakes and apple dumplings. About four pages into the binder, I came across a recipe titled “Coburg Pudding.”

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Rice pudding is pretty self-explanatory. But the name “Coburg” isn’t. Enter the rabbit hole. After a little assistance from the WWW, a search for “Coburg Pudding” resulted in hits for Royal Coburg Puddings. It turns out this haughty sounding dessert hails from 1860-era England and contains the usual pudding ingredients (milk, eggs, sugar, butter, flour to thicken and spices). But the addition of currants threw me off. Currants are definitely not rice. Down the rabbit hole we go further. (FYI–Mrs. Beeton’s Royal Coburg Pudding recipe is here at #1260.)

A generic search on Newspapers.com for “rice pudding” yielded a couple of short instructions to make versions of this grainy goodness and even a diamond found in a bowl of this sweet stuff!

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Fortunately, refining the newspaper search back to “Coburg Pudding” resulted in what I was looking for and matched Great-Grandma’s typed recipe.

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But oh good grief! Who was this Mrs. Lincoln? First Lady Mrs. Lincoln? Back to the WWW. A search in the digital collections of the National Archives turned up a curious document dating to November 1918 and the Spanish Flu Pandemic.

In 1918, the Spanish Flu Pandemic wreaked havoc on the world. It’s estimated to have taken the lives of 50 million people across the globe, more than those who died during World War I a few years earlier. Young adults, the elderly and young children were most at risk for contracting this deadly malady. Those who succumbed to the flu’s rampant spread ended up suffocating to death in a matter of days or weeks.

To help folks recover, the U.S. Food Administration, the New York State Food Commission and Bureau of Conservation issued several recipes titled “After Influenza, Build Up With Food.” These recipes were designed to provide a “more substantial diet…needed to help the body throw off the disease entirely and prevent another sickness. Food must be very nourishing yet the meals must be simple.” At the bottom of the first page in this recommended series is a recipe for Tapioca Cream. Very similar to the Coburn rice pudding I was in hot pursuit of.

Does this sound sadly familiar? Over 100 years later, we’re in the throws of the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic. We’re all trying to figure out why this modern-day epidemic started, how to avoid getting it while trying to live our lives safely and sanely, and can only speculate when this will all be over with. The folks in 1918 were probably wondering the same things too!

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After climbing out of the National Archives collections, I finally figured out who this Mrs. Lincoln was. Mrs. Mary Johnson Bailey Lincoln was the first teacher at the Boston Cooking School in 1879. While there, Mrs. Lincoln wrote Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book: What to Do and What Not to Do in Cooking (1884). An online copy of the 1921 revised edition of this cook book exists; and on page 532 the recipe for Coburg Pudding is found. It’s of particular interest to this culinary researcher, the Fannie Farmer from the famous Boston-Cooking School Cook Book (1896) was a student of Mrs. Mary J. Lincoln. The things you find out going down rabbit holes!

But if you know me, I can’t leave well-enough alone. My mind wandered to what my Great-Grandma was up to around 1918 in rural southeastern Montana. You guessed it…hop back in to Newspapers.com!

In 1909, my Great-Grandparents homesteaded hundreds of dry-land acres, just south of Laurel, Montana. My G-Grandma’s family was part of the “Wisconsin Settlement” group who came to this part of the country from Wisconsin. Land recruiters, advertisements sponsored by the railroad companies of the day, and government agencies encouraged and advised folks like mine how to be homesteaders here and across the west.

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Born in 1892, my G-Grandma wasn’t old enough (age 17) to have a homestead as part of the 1909 Wisconsin Settlement. Her father (my G-G -Grandfather) and her older sister (aged 21) could though. Homesteading requirements in this part of Montana stated:

“Under the provisions of the Mondell Law, recently signed by the President, certain lands in Montana have been designated by the Secretary of the Interior, on which the size of the homestead filing is increased to 320 acres. Filings under the Mondell Law may be made on lands which cannot be irrigated, and which do not contain merchantable timber. The law contains a specific requirement with regard to cultivation and requires residence of five years. A single woman twenty-one years of age or over has the right to make a homestead entry. Marriage after filing does not invalidate her claim, provided she continues to reside on it and makes proper im­provements, and that the man whom she marries is not at the time of their marriage claiming a sepa­rate tract of land under the homestead law.” (Credit)

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Sadly, none of G-Grandma’s one-room schools exist. But the one my Grandpa attended, near their ranch on Spring Creek, does! Built in 1916, the Spring Creek School was located 5-1/2 miles southeast of Laurel, MT. Initially, Spring Creek School was jointly shared by School Districts No. 40 Yellowstone County (Billings, MT) and No. 27 Carbon County (Red Lodge, MT). By the time my Grandpa began attending, Spring Creek School was run solely by District No. 40. In 1933-1934, Grandpa’s teacher was Miss Genevieve Spurgin. The following school year (1934-1935), seventeen pupils attended Spring Creek School under Miss Harriet Uimschneider’s direction. If you look carefully in the picture below, there’s a little boy making a funny face. That’s probably my Grandpa, as he was known for doing this in school pictures. I wonder how those discussions at home went since G-Grandma had been a teacher and G-Grandpa served on the School Board.

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Spring Creek School is now privately owned and is falling into disrepair. In its hey-day, the interior was probably similar to that of the reconstructed one-room schoolhouse at Herbert Hoover National Historic Site in Iowa. Students in this area are now bussed into nearby Laurel to attend school.

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So let’s get back to that pesky Coburn Pudding! A traditional pudding recipe, this rice based version is creamy, silky and slightly sweetened. The 1918 U.S. Food Administration would approve of it’s simple ingredients like milk, eggs, sugar, and cereals like rice; and is nourishing enough for anyone on the mend from an illness to enjoy.

Here are a few tips to master this century’s old recipe:

• Stir often. The rice will stick to the bottom of the pot as it cooks. **If you opt to use precooked rice, just skip this initial step.
• A double-boiler is crucial to avoid burning the pudding. I learned the hard way. Burnt pudding is not a tasty flavoring!
• Don’t overcook the pudding. Just before adding the whisked egg and sugar mixture, make sure the pudding is at the soft-set stage. It shouldn’t be runny, but should jiggle. The pudding goes under the broiler to melt the topping, so err more on the jiggle side. Overcooking the pudding will turn it into a finished rice brick.

Mrs. Lincoln’s original recipe calls for a sauce made of cinnamon and sugar sprinkled on top and dotted with butter. My problem is I don’t always cut the butter into small enough pieces, resulting in pools of butter across the top. To fix this, I creamed the cinnamon, sugar and butter into a paste, dotted it across the top, and swirled it into the pudding’s surface. I also added nutmeg to give the pudding an extra spicy warmth. Yum-o! Here’s to the tidbits of information to be gained from one simple, delicious recipe!

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