The Last Good Diner Dessert

Welcome to Epicurious' "Cook Like a Diner" series, where we obsess about the simple, iconic, super-crunchy pleasures of diner food—and figure out how to make those classic dishes at home.

Diner dreams die hard when it's time for dessert. In a whoosh, there goes that cinema idyll of the perfect pie: the mile-high meringue, the as-American-as apple filling. Here comes the saccharine reality: gooey canned stuff, cardboard crusts, everything looking a bit long in the tooth. It's ironic in Morrissettian sense: something bad happening to you when you'd really rather something good happen. It's like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a decent banana cream. I’m embarrassed by how many times I’ve been taken in, only to stop eating after just a bite. There was that little restaurant somewhere in Utah, that diner in western Illinois. It always seemed like such a good idea.

What happened to the diner pie that anybody actually wanted to eat? Did it ever exist, outside of Twin Peaks? (For the record, the real-life analogue of the Twin Peaks pie has received undermining praise: “actually pretty damn good for a diner.”) Pastry chef Paula Haney felt so nostalgic for good pie that she just went ahead and opened her own pie shop: Chicago’s Hoosier Mama Pie Company, where I worked for a few years, rolling shells and peeling rhubarb. The shop bills its offerings as “that great piece of diner pie you’ve never had.”

The pie problem was analyzed in 2013 by Robert Sietsema, who sampled the stuff at 10 Manhattan diners, declaring the results “generally awful.” (The article is headlined “The Death of Pie.”) Sietsema thinks this reflects the decline of the diner itself, but also the fact that our tastes have changed as options have expanded: Once upon a time, pie (even crappy pie) might've nonetheless been the best thing available. Now we can just go elsewhere. And it probably doesn't help matters that most diners don't make their desserts in-house anymore.

Just don't.

Photo by Rhoda Boone

But there’s a holdout—don’t say salvation—still available on some diner menus: rice pudding. I ate it just last night at Tom’s Restaurant in Brooklyn, where it was the lone dessert to advertise itself (a bit conspicuously) as “homemade.” Diner rice pudding has a cult following that appreciates its status as the last old-school holdout on the diner dessert menu.

But not just any rice pudding will do. As Michael C. Gabriele, author of The History of Diners in New Jersey wrote in an email: "I may not be an authority, but I do know how I like my rice pudding. It's gotta be fresh, cold, creamy and just a little bit sweet. The rice should be smooth and soft—a completely different texture than a side order of rice in a Chinese restaurant. It's nice if the rice pudding has a thin top skin.” Topped with whipped cream. Dash of cinnamon. Lucky for us, these are goals that most diners are able to achieve.

Rice pudding most likely started showing up on diner menus in the 1920s, says Richard J.S. Gutman, who is, quite enviably, probably the country’s preeminent expert on diners. (He wrote the book The American Diner Then and Now.) “Because it is a homemade type of item, it became very popular,” he said—the perfect complement to the roast pork, or meat loaf and mashed potatoes, that were then popular diner fare. Somehow it remained homemade even as diners began ordering in their mile-high meringue pies and 7-layer fudge cakes.

One reason diners keep making it themselves? Unlike pie, it's almost effortless to make a good batch from scratch. “It’s a standard, it’s a staple, people love it,” says Gutman. “People don’t think twice about it, yet if it weren’t there, people would say, ‘What’s the matter? You gotta have it.’” And if you've got to have it for tonight's dinner, there's just one thing to do.

Diner-Style Rice Pudding

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