Rice Pudding: A Rite of Passage

There comes a time when everyone needs to establish holiday traditions in their household, no matter what family and friends do.

When I offered my rice pudding to my daughter's holiday table, her mother-in-law immediately bragged about hers, handed down through her Portuguese ancestors. "I always finish with a teaspoon of vanilla."

Hoping not to raise hackles, I mentioned I add a squirt of lemon juice with mine. I didn't bother saying I had changed this recipe since it was handed down from Danish ancestors to me through my mother. It was apparent no one was really interested in this favorite dish I always made for our family's traditional Christmas Eve dinner.

Preserving holiday traditions between my husband's family and mine hit a bump when we joined a non-Christian religion for a few years. We even had a wedding prescribed by that religion that had set eyebrows twitching and knickers twisting in a bunch. The ceremony, in fact, had been so unorthodox and quick that the photographer was caught off guard when Jeff and I leaned in for The Kiss.

But I digress. This is a story about how learning to cook an heirloom recipe becomes a rite of passage.

There is a crinkled and stained shred of notebook paper in my recipe folder where I wrote down the recipe as my mother demonstrated how she made her rice pudding.

"I'm the only one of my sisters who doesn't cook the eggs when I add them," she told me.

It was one of those rare moments when I saw a glimmer of pride in my mother's eyes. This was her triumph over three sisters who she perceived as having succeeded in all things where she had not. It added weight as well as pride to this cooking lesson she gave me that day.

Only upon occasion have I referred to the little shred of paper, to remind me of the ingredients and the amounts. Eventually, I memorized it more or less.

Cooking from memory is like playing jazz. The basic melody is there, rolling around in the brain while the fingers play their own version of it during that particular gig. Watching musicians knock out their pieces, one would be convinced they played it the same way every time. That's the beauty of it.

Creativity pops up, defying the tyranny of the sheet music. Thus, while I keep that piece of paper in the front of my folder, I don't always refer to it. Somehow, the pudding always comes out good.

The challenge to that memorization came while I lived in an Israeli kibbutz for a semester in 1976. Christmas was coming and a tiny contingent of our group of volunteers were staying away from the mayhem of Bethlehem, remaining at the kibbutz. I wanted to share my family's recipe with my new friends.

Earlier that day after finishing my assigned work, I walked to the neighboring village of Kiryat Ata to buy the ingredients. I passed the little market where burlap bags and barrels displayed exotic grains, dried fruits, nuts, and other commodities I had no idea how to use. A bit further down the street was a cinderblock building with a sign of colorful neon artfully spelling out in Hebrew, Supermarket.

Despite its mom-and-pop size and familiarity, I still found some of the items' packages confounding. Milk in plastic bags, for instance. Dried black currents took the place of raisins. Instead of bottles, tiny bags of spices measured perfectly for the dish. Women who shopped there regularly brought their own string bags to carry home the groceries. Where I came from, paper bags were still used though plastic was just entering the scene. I hoped the store's plastic bag would survive the mile walk back to the kibbutz.

The recipe called for eggs, raisins, nutmeg, sugar, lemon juice, and milk.  Mom used evaporated milk, although reading that ragged notepaper later, I learned it actually said concentrated milk, whatever that is. Perhaps it meant condensed milk. I changed my recipe accordingly years later, substituting condensed milk for the cup of sugar and evaporated milk. With my kibbutz pudding though, I would follow Mom's recipe as best as I could remember it.

I didn't know how much of the kibbutz supplies I could use, so I bought as much as I could from the store. Upon returning, I faced an industrial kitchen with free-standing gas-fired burners instead of a residential-style stove. This was truly becoming a cultural learning experience. In a state of befuddlement, I switched on the gas and managed somehow not to blow up the place.

By the time darkness fell upon our Christmas Eve, a half dozen of us gathered in a small room of the dorm where the semester abroad volunteers lived. We huddled around a kerosene heater, bundled in jackets and blankets to ward off the damp chill in that desolate building. We had to leave the windows open a crack to vent the exhaust from the heaters.

With all the other volunteers gone, the shutters rattled more loudly and the halls echoed with an eerier moan. Because this dorm sat far from the housing areas, anyone could sneak into the dorm from the road. It felt more like Halloween than Christmas.

All of us brought offerings to our holiday potluck. My rice pudding was the only dish prepared from scratch and became a warm and eagerly received gift by my friends. We missed our families and lives back home. Some wished they'd gone to Bethlehem with the rest of the mob. The rainy winter blues had deepened as the last few weeks of our semester dragged to a close.

When that time came, most of these kids would head off to Greece or other parts unknown, leaving me, the oldest of the crew, boarding a plane straight for home. I dreaded those farewells. Some of these people would stay with me in spirit for years. I would miss not seeing them every day and sharing our life stories. Somehow, the creamy sweetness of the pudding softened my loneliness as I wondered which ones would bother keeping in contact.

After I married and Jeff and I struggled to establish our own rhythms, the rice pudding became a staple at our holiday table. One year, we tacked redwood boughs over the hole in the wall where our wood stove mantle once hung. The Loma Prieta earthquake that October shook us and our traditions to the core, requiring us to improvise. The rice pudding brought back a sense of normalcy.

My in-laws included us in their very solid traditional parties, gifting us with tree ornaments and other things that weren't really a part of the non-Christian religion we were trying hard to internalize. It was all very strange as we attempted to balance the social pressures from family, our daughter's school, and work expectations. I didn't want to make our new faith a source of contention. The rice pudding provided our own personal tradition we could observe just in our home regardless of others' religious or social norms around Christmas.

Thus, it continues. My daughter has yet to ask for my recipe. And I don't think I'll use my mother's method if called to teach her. After all, if she's interested, she got two versions of the recipe available. And I won't force her to learn mine if she doesn't want it.

Mom rousted me from an afternoon's TV binge with a grumpy "get in here. I want you to learn how to make this pudding!"

She didn't have to ask me twice. I loved her rice pudding. It was not a Christmas tradition in my childhood home; instead it warmed our dinner table throughout the winter. Served with a sprinkle of cinnamon on top along with a stack of buttery raisin toast, it was a very sweet Danish repast on a howling winter night.

As I ponder my Danish ancestors, would they have had the money for the exotic ingredients? They were destitute in those days, especially since Britain had decided to bomb Copenhagen for supporting Napoleon. The family's extreme poverty, and a bit of encouragement from Mormon missionaries, inspired them to come to Zion.

Perhaps the recipe made it to Utah tucked inside the handcart my great-grandmother, Sophia, pushed across the Great Plains and over the Rockies. It was the only bit of Danish culture that survived through the generations. Thank you, Sophia. I will think of you every time I stir the condensed milk into the pot.

If you enjoyed this essay, feel free to check out more poems, essays, and stories in the Ring Around the Basin Archive.