To make this exquisite recipe, you will need a wood fired stove. It is important that you ignore any operating instructions that might come with the stove. Calls to Grandmothers and other relatives who have owned such appliances in the past are also not allowed.

So fire up the stove and smoke out the kitchen. You should aim to get the oven to a temperature of 300degF (the optimum temperature for slow cooking your milk pudding), but if you ignore the stove’s instructions, you’ll have the oven up to 400degF in no time, and the top of your rice pudding will be burned to a lovely crisp. Don’t worry if this happens – simply just rip the top off the pudding, pour in a cup of milk, watch the pudding soak up the fluid like a thirsty cactus, then slip it back in the oven again for another grilling.

Grandma’s rice pudding recipe is something along these lines:

Into a pyrex dish:

• Pour approx 600mL milk
• Add 2 heaped tablespoons of white long grain rice
• Add one tablespoon of sugar
• Add a few drops of vanilla essence (we had none in the house, so we skipped this)
• Stir for a few minutes, then add a pinch of nutmeg. Don’t stir the nutmeg in – it floats on top and flavours the skin of the rice pudding (we had no nutmeg either, and thoughtfully decided against using black pepper as a substitute).
• Bung the pyrex dish into a water bath (a bigger dish with water in it) and cook slowly at 300degF or approx 150degC for 3-4 hours or until set. In our case, we put it into a hot oven and burned it to a crisp within 2 hours.

Serve the resuscitated pudding (see instructions at top) to your guests only once they are on the third bottle of wine. That way they won’t know the difference. This dish complements the tough old boot that resembled roast mutton that I also cooked that day (thank goodness the guests were sozzled).

Alternatively, buy a can of creamed rice, and heat in the microwave for 1 minute. Best you remove the creamed rice from the can first though.