This creamy rice pudding is a traditional recipe from Limburg, a province in the south of The Netherlands. It should be eaten with blue plums: soak dried blue plums overnight, cook shortly in their soaking juice, thicken the juice with potato-flour/farina and cool before serving together with the pudding.

Put the milk in a large pan on a slow heat. Cut the vanilla pod open lengthwise, drop it in the milk. When milk is almost boiling, take out the vanilla pod, scrape out the soft black centre and put this in the milk. Your milk (and pudding) will be full of tiny black spots: this is supposed to happen. Throw the rest of the vanilla pod away. Put the rice in the boiling milk, cook on slow heat for 1 hour approx. Beat the egg yolks with a fork in a small bowl; add a little of the hot rice, mix. Put the yolk mixture back into the rest of the rice and stir well. Do not boil, or the pudding might curdle. When mixed well, turn off heat. Add sugar (try a bit to check if it's sweet enough for you). Let pudding cool until almost cold. Beat the egg whites until very stiff and fold them into the rice. Pour the pudding into a serving bowl and cool before eating.

The rice pudding will not be firm, but more or less runny. This is also meant to be... Enjoy!