Rice pudding with real custard made with eggs, and large quantities of whipped cream, and a small quantity of finely pulped apricots (tinned variety: push through a sieve). And one blanched almond in the whole white bowl, which makes one Lord of Misrule if my mum had ever been yuletide enough to have such a thing at her parties. It was delicious, and very rich, and one ate it in very, very small bowls. But my mum stopped having those parties, and I haven't made it since.

A site with more details: http://www.eurochristmas.com/euroinfo/iceland.htm

If that is actually the Finnish goat, and not the Finnish elf, I don't understand how he can use a bicycle. I mean, how would he brake?

We also have hustomten figures in the house, I believe fully in them, my mother not so much, but it is a very Swedish. ha ha. The holiday meal is ham (boars were sacred to Freyr and Freyja), and we do have a straw goat among the decor put up.

I checked on the web, but found no mention of rice pudding or bicycles in the authoritative:

Reindeer grazing and soil nutrient cycling in boreal and tundra ecosystems
Sari Stark
Department of Biology, University of Oulu
Academic Dissertation to be presented with the assent of the Faculty of Science, University of Oulu, for public discussion in Kuusamonsali (Auditorium YB210), Linnanmaa, on May 18th, 2002, at 12 noon.
Copyright © 2002
University of Oulu
Reviewed by
Professor Sven Jonasson
Docent Heikki Setälä
UNIVERSITY OF OULU, OULU FINLAND 2002
ISBN 951-42-6692-7
URN:ISBN:9514266927
Abstract:
"In northernmost Fennoscandia, grazing by reindeer (Rangifer tarandus L.) has a substantial impact on the vegetation of boreal forests and arctic-alpine tundra heaths, which are reflected in below-ground processes, such as nutrient mineralization and soil organic matter decomposition. In the present thesis, the effects of reindeer grazing on soil nutrient cycling were studied by comparing grazed situation with an ungrazed control area in ten boreal forests and six arctic-alpine tundra heaths...."

On the other hand, there's
By Bikes and Canoes to Reindeer Farm
"Departure from Nature Safaris safari house by bikes towards Reindeer Farm. Driving distance approx. 12 km. At the Farm we get to know the reindeers and the herder will tell us about everyday life in a Reindeer Farm. We will enjoy coffee and bun in Kota after the introduction. Time to change bikes to canoes! Our canoeing trip is on River Kitinen, a peaceful and beautiful river. Canoeing distance approx. 10 km...."

and then:

Dear Santa,
Could I PLEASE have a bike for Christmas. I know you think you sent me a bike for Christmas last year. Mum told me not to sound ungracious and rude, but what was that thing you sent me? It folds in the middle? There's no basket. And are wheels supposed to be that small. Please Santa. A real bike that won't get me laughed at by all the kids at school.
Fiona.

Dear Fiona.
What is it with you kids and the fricken' bikes. Do you know how freaken' heavy those suckers are. The reindeer are a couple of thousand years old now and humping a hundred tonnes of metal and rubber halfway around the world is not making their wheezing any better. Getting laughed at by your friends is a way of growing up, especially when you take to them in a darkened alley with a baseball bat (darn, I spoiled your Christmas surprise now, haven't I).
Your mother is right about cutting out the whining ... spoilt little brat.
Remember, good girls get good presents and bad girls get even better ones.
Are you going to wait up for me like you did last year? That would be fun again.
Luuuuuuuuuuuuurve Santa.

Recipe at:

Scandinavian porridge
Last Updated: April 4, 2002
The Kitchen Technician
Sandy D'Amato
ARCHIVE

If the word "porridge" evokes memories of Three Bears stick-to-your-ribs-like sustenance, you are not far off. Porridge is a frugal dish with a base of usually wheat, oats, rice, etc. cooked to a mush - filling and simple.

In Scandinavia, the typical porridge is cooked with cream or milk (as this is a dairy area), and is finished with cinnamon or other spices with a bit of sweetness to make it more palatable.

Traditionally, Scandinavian Christmas Eve meals began with rice porridge. Over the years this porridge has evolved into a very elegant rice pudding or "risgrynsgrot" that now takes its place at the end of the meal as dessert.

The recipe I've developed is flavored with cardamom and has a brittle creme brulee-type glaze. To add excess, a bit of lingonberry preserves wouldn't hurt. Either way, this pudding will bring a smile to your fussiest reindeer.

Sanford "Sandy" D'Amato, chef/co-owner of Sanford Restaurant and Coquette Cafe is a James Beard Award winner.

Mine was the first "mixed marriage" in our family (the lawfully wedded is Dutch-American, all the way on both sides). Everyone seems to be managing just fine: lefse is a bonding experience.

Goats don't brake. Elves . . . maybe if there's something in it for them.

Hm, giving a gift to the guy who got the almond in his porridge sounds a lot like they stole the idea from Willy Wonka hiding invitations in his candy bars.

Burying something in holiday food, with a reward for whoever chokes on . . . I mean, finds it, covers a lot of territory. The best-known would be the silver thruppeny bit in the Christmas pudding (see also Smith of Wootton Major), but the baby in the New Orleans King Cake also comes to mind. I've heard that some King Cake bakers have stopped embedding the baby on product liability grounds. I think they put it in the package, and you can enfantify the cake yourself, though this is Not At All the Right Thing. Of course, this may all be an urban legend about Those Bad People Who Won't Let Us Have Fun.

The almond, at least, is a Scandahoovianly practical solution.

And besides, your place ought to have an elf. He'll like the interior angles.

The wind here, irrelevantly, is doing the 40-50 MPH thing. I am on the top floor. For the moment.

Or is this a New Year's sort of thing?

Actually, I heard this from Julia's husband. Maybe she can pass on a query.

I should make up a version of this for the italian side of the family. A foreign object in the polenta, perhaps, or a gnocchi made of plaster. ("Ah. That means you make a mortgage payment for the host.")

Yet, while in Sweden, my sister and I saw trolls *everywhere* - gnome and troll dolls in the windows of lamp shops, grocery stores, clothing shops. When we asked, Gunnel and the other Swedes - equally religious as she - informed us that those are Quite Swedish. They saw no contradiction between joking that trolls will eat bad children and their religious beliefs. I suppose when it's your socio-cultural tradition, it's in a category by its own.

Then again, I also had a Southern grandmother who was staunchly Presbyterian, who used to wet her broom and shake it over the plants. She'd tell me, "it sounds like rain, and that reminds the clouds of what they should be doing" - and if that ain't sympathetic magic, I don't know what is.

Lucy, are those imps the ones whose parents eat bad children? Iceland's understanding of elves hasn't been softened as much as the rest of Europe's. Graydon tells me that a phenomenal number of houses in Iceland have some volume of space with a small door on it, for the elves to live in. Somebody else was telling me about a survey in Iceland which revealed that 10% of Icelanders definitely believe in elves, 10% definitely believe elves don't exist, and the other 80% didn't want to answer in case the elves were listening.

Dan, if you can believe in a Christmas-present-delivering goat riding on a bicycle, why balk at the brakes?

Andrew, I loved the troll story when you posted it, and have no problem with you referring to it again. You have that great and necessary characteristic by grace of which all else may be forgiven: you're mindful of your audience.

The Lagerlof story spooks me. I keep feeling like she's talking about the experience of raising a mentally or emotionally abnormal child.

JVP, I'm not going to ask how you think that cut-and-pasted material is relevant, because I'm pretty sure you know it isn't. I'm asking why you think it's interesting. I mean, it's not overwhelmingly boring per se; but it connects with single nouns in my post, rather than with any larger sense of what's going on in it.

Mris, that sounds great, except for the lefse. Can I swap it for three kinds of pickled herring?

Mike, you have to see the new place: clean, well lit, well ventilated, so sturdily built that I'm going to have to get some new drill bits if I want to fasten anything to the exterior walls, and blessedly rectilinear. The hardwood flooring has an unusual dotted appearance because whoever put it down didn't trust that the normal number of nails per stick would be enough.

Joy, joy, joy. And you wouldn't believe how many health problems cleared right up when we moved away from the old place. This one I can imagine having a self-respecting house-elf. My theory is that the old place lost its luck when the landlord remodeled the bathroom and plastered over the third window. (From the back yard, you can see that there had been three tall thin windows set close together there, suggesting that the original owner's previous profession had involved explosives.)

By the way, we now have a proper spare room in the basement, a sort of mother-in-law apartment, complete with door, broadband, separate street access, no floods pouring through the ceiling, and a second loo on the same floor.

That's 40-50 m.p.h. wind in Minneapolis? Nasty weather.

Stefan, over my lifetime to date I've put a fair amount of effort into keeping small rocks out of bean soup and refritos. I'm not going to go putting rocks into food. It's hard on the teeth.

Greer, devil-stuff is other people's superstitions. I was shocked recently to see, in a list of superstitions, the belief that you should never transport your old broom to a new house. I never thought of that as a belief. It's just what you do.

Despite whatever Christtina thinks.

Except (xcept?) when X means "Trans" as in Xformer and Xistor. Electrical Engineering folks will back me up on this. I did know a Caltech student who wanted to invent an ontological "Existor."

My great-grandmother Velke (literally "Violet") made exquisite (xquisite?) rice pudding with raisins and almonds on Hanukkah. Hers was a Galician recipe. Related to her amazing bread pudding and noodle pudding. She hand-made the egg noodles first. Did the Vikings make it to the Jewish villages of Eastern Europe, I wonder? And those reindeer -- cloven hooves or not?

Speaking as someone whose childhood character-forming experiences included not merely milking the goat but getting the goat out of trees -- 'happy as a goat in an apple tree' isn't a proverb, but it could be -- I don't think you have to worry about it. The goat will arrive where the goat feels it ought to be, and leave questions of mechanism with the same sort of person who questions why the goat is there.

Teresa --

Making snowmen of tumbleweed is an image that will stay with me a long while.

Andrew --

Ylf only went twee late in the reign of Victoria. Before that, the best you could hope for were the opinionated dead.

"Most European Ungualtes belong to either the Cervidae or the Bovids.

There are 38 species of deer in the Family Cervidae. They are a very succesful family widely distributed throughout the world. Deer have evolved as runners. They tend to have slight frames but long legs. The cloven hoves help facilitate fast running. They have good sences to avoid predators. All deer are ruminants. One particular feature of deer is that the males often possess antlers, which are grown from spring and are used in the rut. Unlike horns, the antlers are not permanant and are lost each year."

Strictly speaking, it should be "Χmas," not "Xmas." (Depending on your browser, those may appear as the same thing. If so, just take my word for it that they're different. Look at the source if you don't believe me.)

Now I don't come from an Orthodox religious household, and I've never seen anybody else, including the Orthodox people I've spent time with on Hanukka, sing the whole thing.

So, why? Tonight I found out.

Larry Josephson was talking to Ismar Schorsch (president of the Jewish Theological Seminary) earlier on WNYC, and Schorch starts talking about his father Emil, who was the second Rabbi at the Hüngheim Synagoge in Hannover.

Schorsch Senior was arrested on November 9, 1938, and Schorsch's family secured his release by presenting visas for transit to England. Schorsch Junior recounted how he and his family lit the candles for the first day of Hanukka in Hannover (Wednesday, December 14, 1938), and the candles for the second day in London, after they flew from Germany to Britain. Ferociously expensive trip for the time. They sang all the stanzas of Maoz Tzur in thanks for being saved.

Here's my family's Hanukka story. My grandfather was also arrested on Kristallnacht, went to Dachau, and had his release secured by visas to England and hefty bribes to the Gauleiter. Here's the divergence - my grandmother went to England first, in April 1939, and my grandfather followed at the very end of August. On arrival in Liverpool after the beginning of the war, he was arrested and interned on the Isle of Wight as an enemy alien, and released in November 1939.

We light a Hanukka menorah that my grandfather made from scrap metal. He worked in a West End bicycle factory converted to munitions, and he made a menorah out of some scrap stainless sheet metal, because all of my grandparents' judaica had been confiscated during the emigration inventory of their belongings.

(My parents, at the time, also made me wait until January 6th to open my presents. I'm not sure whether this was to fit in with local culture, or to get more shopping days).

The contemporary Swedish Yule gnome is pretty much identical to the anglosaxon Santa Clause I'd say, and to some extent he was from the start.

There is a store here called Ingebretson's that sells all things Norwegian, including straw goats - Julboks - in several sizes, up to 3 feet tall or larger. And elves, or rather, statues of elves and trolls and other such creatures. Very popular.

I think I will put out an offering for the trolls - something is riding that wind. I can hear it.

I don't know about tomte, but nisse come in many varieties. Julenisse are the ones who leave goodies, get a tithe of risengrod (sorry, can't spell tonight) and only appear to children too young to talk. Husnisse are the traditional ones who clean a bit and take care of the farm animals. They like cats.

We do have juleboken (is that the correct plural?) all over the place. These are the compromises you make when a Jew marries a Danish pagan.

Our family, with three small children, still celebrates this way (except that, being pagan, we do it on the solstice). When I was growing up, it was a big family reunion celebration, on Christmas eve, with three generations all collected together, some 18 people. Now we are scattered, and the children have children of their own.

Yes, we still leave a bowl of risengrot out for the nisse. The Christmas eve/Jul meal was/is a 'fasting' meal -- all white and yellow: boiled cod, cauliflower, and potatoes, with risengrot for dessert. Butter and yellow mustard sauce if you wish, cinnamon and butter in the risengrot. We also had/have the almond in the risengrot -- we kids grew up thinking it was found by chance, but I was told as an adult that my grandmother would 'fix' the lottery. Kids got it more often than adults, of course.

After the dinner, we would dance around the tree and sing songs, then open presents. Christmas day was a feast, and 'Santa Claus' would come, but to small children, it was an anticlimax. The real celebration was Christmas eve, when we got to open presents. Santa only brought small presents, and only came the once, so he was a comparitively unimportant figure in our childhood.

I have some sympathy with that sort of person. In fact I am that sort of person, except that I don't really expect answers to those sorts of questions. Although, I can't but note that the goatly characteristic you describe is what made me start wondering why a goat would be out giving presents. If I were the goat, I would get the sheep to do it, or maybe the horse.

There is a basement apartment. It is frequently rented out. We now return you to tonight's holiday special, Oo-er, There's an Almond in My Puddin', with Clive Owen as Captain Vimes.

Moving from Christmas and early readers to older, Nancy Farmer's The Sea of Trolls was very satisfactory.

Coaster brakes, of course! I've never completely trusted those hand things. I mean, it's not as if you need to brake and pedal at the same time, now is it?

We went to The Christmas Revels tonight, this year featuring an Elizabethan theme, lots of Fa la la la la and muted sackbut. Judging by the reaction at the Will Call table, there had been some discussion among the box office staff about the fact that tickets were being held for "Yule".

["I Hear the Horns of Elfland Blowing", opera premiere at the John Anson Ford Theatre]

The owner is an unworthy member of the ancient line who have owned the land forever, and has gambled almost everything away. One day, he gambles the house and grounds itself away to a passing guards officer. In the middle of the game, the tomte leaves his barn, and offers a bargain. He can win back the estate for the rightful family, but there will be a price ...

Sure enough, the luck changes in the card game. All the losses are restored, and more. The next day, the owner puts on full uniform, mounts his favourite horse, and rides, without a backward glance, down into the lake. Neither he nor the horsemake any attempt to swim. The brother inherits, and is prudent enough to meet the tomte's approval.

Nissar appreciates hard work, and will be mischievous to lazy people. They also expect to be treated with the utmost respect.

And yes, the dancing around the Christmas tree is also traditional.

Anaphylactic shock?

That'd be my present... ;^)

Ingebretsen's had lutefisk when I was in there Saturday. I hope they're out by the time I go back. They also have Swedish meatball meat, with the different meats mixed and spiced, so I don't have to spend time mixing ground meats and spices myself -- I just roll the meatballs, cook 'em, and make the gravy. It's a very good thing. I will forgive them the lutefisk. (My grandmother lives outside the Promised Land, down in Nebraska, so I am often dispatched to Ingebretsen's, Hearts-and-Vines, and Taste of Scandinavia on errands just before I go down to visit. When I was a kid, nobody in Omaha got lutefisk jokes. My parents are very much like the British civil service people who settled in India: they're very comfortable in exile and have established their life there, but there are some customs they are not going to give up. "This is what we eat in the afternoons. And I don't care how they say it here, that's not how we say it." And of course their kid had to go home to the homeland for her education.)

Teresa, as many kinds of herring as you like. We went to a smorgasbord with nine when we were in Sweden, and my uncle apologized profusely for the lack of selection. He was deeply embarrassed.

Mmmm... Herring. Must go get some herring. Does anyone else here think that mackerel sushi tastes somewhat like pickled herring, or am I the only one?

Jane

I have a sixpence which I use for this purpose. Sixpences are known to be lucky -- it's astonishing that they were permitted to go out of circulation, really.

I believe the almond just brings luck. If it were a present, I think more people would do what Chad's cousin did a year or so ago and sneak in a handful of almonds from the mixed nuts assortment on the table.

Scary thought:

Some day the toke may incorporate nanotechnology, and the finder may undergo a real transformation.

Perhaps it is a common way to select individuals when there is not enough of something to go around?

Or to normalize social pressure? If a slave can be King of the feast eve, then said slave might be less unruly for the next year...

The Yule log tradition goes back at least that far as well. A way to span from one year to another, I suppose.

and now I'm going to revisit my cluttergnome tale, what with all this talk of house-elf, lot gnome, or whathave you. I think the diversity of the cultural 'elf/gnome/brownie' as a part of the house is fairly interesting. The Penates and Lares from the Roman tradition seem to be of similar vein.

Here’s a couple of comments but first my 2 cents’ worth about rice puddings: It’s fairly common in Iceland to serve rich rice pudding with a hidden almond just before Christmas Eve dinner, but I think this is generally perceived as being a Danish custom. I was always under the impression that it was a French dish originally. In Denmark it’s commonly called ‘ris alamand’. In fact, in Iceland it’s commonly called ris alamand.

But to the comments:

LUCY:

“When I visited Iceland at Christmas one year I was surprised to see shoes on the windowsills of many of the apartments”

This is a German custom which caught on in Iceland in the beginning of the 20th century. Children put a shoe in the windowsill before they go to bed and when they wake up in the morning ‘Santa Claus’ has left a little something in there for them, a piece of candy or a small toy.

“It seems the custom of receiving gifts from the Jólasveinar (mischievious imps) was not only an important tradition ... “ etc

The Jólasveinar are 13 in number and “mischievious imps” sounds like a good description. They descend from the mountains at Christmas time, no doubt attracted by the warmth, light and food. The first one appears 13 days before Christmas and the last one on Christmas Eve.
In the latter part of the 20th century the Jólasveinar somehow got mixed up with Santa Claus and started to show up in red suits and big white beards (on TV, in children’s Christmas parties etc). Yet they retained their old mischievious nature and their old names (‘candle thief’, ‘door slammer’ and suchlike). So Iceland has 13 Santa look-alikes.

“ ... but the elves came down from the mountains specifically to get hold of some of the Christmas food.”

That would be the Jólasveinar, not elves. Elves keep a low-profile during Christmas. If they need to move house they do so on New Year’s Eve. It’s wise to stay away from crossroads on New Year’s Eve. Twelfth Night, that’s when the elves have a big celebration.

TERESA:

“Lucy, are those imps the ones whose parents eat bad children?”

Yes. Or at least they stuff misbehaving children into a bag and take them away (to the mountains?) The parents are ‘ minor ogres’ (or something like that), from mythological past.

Then of course is the big black Christmas Cat. Children who don’t get any presents at Christmas are taken away by the Christmas Cat.

“Graydon tells me that a phenomenal number of houses in Iceland have some volume of space with a small door on it, for the elves to live in.”

Hm. I’m Icelandic and I’ve never heard of this. Actually house-elves are not much in evidence in Iceland. Elves live in big rocks, monoliths, cliff-faces. They are not in the habit of taking up residence in people’s houses. But sometimes they entice or invite people into THEIR houses.

And finally Teresa, thanks for a great site!

My German-born great-aunts always insisted that they have no idea about what everyone was telling them should be their ancestral tradition.

And yes, absolutely, the mixture of Christian and pagan is happily blended throughout Swedish traditions & holidays, not just Christmas. At Easter children of both sexes dress up as witches and go from door to door on their broomsticks swapping easter drawings they've made for candy and money. Also at Easter it's traditional to bring newly green budding branches or pussy willows and hang them all over with blown out, decorated eggs. At midsummer people go out and gather greens and wildflowers for the maypole, raise it, and dance traditional old ring dances around it. And story has it that if you want to dream of your intended, you should gather seven different kinds of wildflower on midsummer eve and sleep with them under your pillow.

All of which are engaged in by Christian as well as secular Swedes. It's just like that.

Lutfisk is for pikers. Baby-stuff. The real hairy-man test of raw Scandinavianity is surströmming, a substance so vile, with a stench so profound, that even afficionados generally will only partake of it in summer, when it can be eaten outdoors. Think the limburger of fish, only moreso. Think kimchi, as visited upon a combination of fish and milk products, and allowed to rot and ferment until the can literally bulges outward. This is the foodstuff that will set you falling upon the lutfisk with cries of joy and gratitude.

It's a very old story, and it's told in many ways in many places, down to this day.

But when did rice get to Scandinavia?

However, there's a reasonable, ah, mock? rice-pudding recipe in the same cookbook that involves using plain yogurt, and while it's not the same, my digestion likes it better. :-p

I loved being in Iceland at Christmastime, so much so that I am going to visit it in August so I can can actually see all the sights I missed during the too-short days.

*silly Korean-American enamored of rice pudding!*

Traveling to IKEA with my mother-in-law is a similar experience.

Yoon, The Joy of Cooking has such a recipe. I just go ahead and substitute it straight up--use less sugar, though.

So the rice pudding eating probably isn't an ancient custom but rather a medieval one. I hope nobody's too disappointed -- I expect the elves took to it as soon as they tried it.

The bowl left out for julenissen contained risengrød, not risalamande.

Added fact that some might not realize, in Scandinavia, Christmas is celebrated on the 24th.

Historically, risengrød was eaten before the Christmas dinner, to lessen peoples' appetite - I guess that when people could afford more food, it changed into a desert, risalamande, instead.

Having said all that, I can't stand risalamande, and certainly don't have any intention of eating any, even though I am a Dane living in Denmark.

Bjorn, I beg you pardon? On behalf of the Danes, I would like to log a protest. Denmark is certainly part of Scandinavia (which consists of Denmark, Norway and Sweden).

"I'm sorry, sir, but Mr. Finsbury has recently departed for the United Kingdom."

"Oh! Is it too late to send flowers?"

It explained that the Encyclopedia Britannica was misnamed because it was originally published in Scotland.

My reaction (since Scotland was still part of Great Britain last time I checked) was to take the rest of the book with even more skepticism than I had already been doing. (At least it was a freebie I acquired, rather than something I'd actually paid for.)

Bjorn, Finland and Iceland (and Greenland for that matter) was part of the Union of Kalmar, but not as countries in their own right. But, we are getting quite off-topic by now.

When my dad told my (Norwegian) grandmother he was bringing home my mom (who had a Nordic surname), my grandmother asked him how she spelled it - she was concerned that my mother might be Swedish. Dad was able to reassure Gramie that Mom was, in fact, of Danish extraction. (Gramie's family enjoyed an enduring bitterness about the aftermath of the Kiel settlement).

In later years, I dated a Finnish exchange student for a short period of time. Gramie asked, "He doesn't say he's Scandinavian, does he?"

I always figured that rigidly defining these things was Gramie's way of hanging on to her homeland. Either that or it was a great big internal joke to her. It was hard to tell with Gramie sometimes.

They probably both think the Danes are frivolous; the Norwegians have Ibsen (and even gloomier prose writers), the Swedes have Strindberg, and the Danes have ... Hans Christian Anderson? (Counterexamples welcome.) Not to mention the Tuborg brewery sign big enough to be seen across the Kattegat. You can see the extremes in the Resistance museums; the Norwegian is an Experience (starting with a metal sculpture of papers on a bayonet, in the midst of gloomy passageways underneath Oslo castle), while the Danish is laid out matter-of-fact-ly in a building that could be a church hall if it had fewer windows.

The reason I ask is that my mother has a bunch of versions of relatively common things that don't seem to be much like anyone else's. Her rice pudding, for instance, starts with (generally leftover) cooked rice. Is this as unusual as it seems to me?

I yearn for the touch of your kiss, dear
But much more for the sound of your skis, dear
You light up the dark
With a deft telemark
As we dance to the Norwegian Tango.

As the winter day dims and turns dusky
To the howls of a solit'ry husky
It's as though the aurora
Was made specially for ya -
It seems that you glow as you tango.

I am your mate!
Don't make me stand and wait!
Just call me as I skate
Upon these frozen fjords...

I am in pain, dear!
You're driving me insane, dear!
I wander like (yes, you've guessed it)
In their Siberian hordes...

I remember when we met (in Bergen)
You just smiled and you wished me "god morgen",
But there isn't a chap
Between here and Nordkapp
More in love than I am when we tango.

My rice pudding recipe starts with leftover, cooked rice. Since it's from "Joy of Cooking," and all their variants involve cooked rice, I can't imagine that's unusual.

What recipe do you have that starts with raw rice?