The hippie and health nut moms of my acquaintance were milky, splendid earth mothers; their food was good for you, but bad flavor and texture were often the cost of good nutrition.

Feeling low, I yearned after one of those soft puddly custards or cool puddings I was fed as a child. I huddled under my pale blue electric blanket, dial switched to a balmy maternal 4, and asked myself about the solace these humble, almost austere dishes offer.

I thought how, in my case (weak in the legs, woozy and easily weary), this even temporary loss of well-being drew me back to earlier loses. That initial loss, for most of us, was the moment when our mothers first left us with a babysitter or turned us from breast to bottle, or in some way frustrated one of what had become our routine expectations.

Our entire world, back then, was Mother, our climate the weather of her warm odors. Her milky breast withdrawn, or her actual solid presence gone out the door, our world dissolved. Pudgy hands reached up and found no one. Wails, as far as we knew, went unheard. Some of us sought comfort in a pacifier, wildly suckling its rubbery teat. Others clutched the teddy bear or anxiously twisted a worn, stained security blanket. These objects reminded us of Mother; they substituted, momentarily, for her.

Of course we don't consciously remember any of this. We don't remember that first time when Mother did not unbutton her blouse to give us dinner. We don't remember that evening when Mother - lipsticked, smelling of Patou's Joy, and wearing watered silk that rustles - hurried out the door and left us sobbing. But just as an old war wound acts up in bad weather, so when new losses occur, old losses reverberate through the psyche, echoing pain.

With this in mind, it made sense to me, ailing as I was, that I longed after one of those simple, pure dishes we call "comfort" or "nursery" food. What better stand-in for mother love (even if our mother never fixed us anything better than a fried bologna sandwich, with the bologna charred, because she was forgetful and impatient) than these mothering foods.

Specifically, I wanted rice pudding. I felt too ill, too shaky even to gather the ingredients, much less follow a recipe through to it's end. So I got myself (weak-kneed and dizzy) to the supermarket. I rustled about in the dairy section, on shelves from which hung six-pack containers of vanilla and chocolate and tapioca puddings and red Jell-o. I found on a bottom shelf two 14-ounce cartons of Alex brand "Rice & Raisin Pudding."

I got my pudding home, grabbed a spoon, returned to my spot under the warm blue cover, popped open the plastic lid, and dipped in. I'm not that picky, but Alex's rice pudding bears faint resemblance to homemade. Alex scrimps on rice, and if I'd gotten to the bottom of his gelatinous goo, where most the raisins had sunk, I don't think I'd have been able to count out more than a few dozen. And the raisins were nasty, sourish little things.

No sooner did I feel well again than a friend visiting for a week took sick. After 24 hours of tottering from guest room to bathroom, Ted was ghastly pale and fit to do no more than switch channels back and forth between Sally Jesse Raphael and Geraldo. So I gathered ingredients for rice pudding. The essentials are simple: rice, jumbo eggs, whole milk or half-and-half, sugar, butter (not margarine), golden raisins, vanilla.

Cookbooks offering rice pudding recipes variously suggest long grain, medium grain, and short grain rice, white rice and brown. Long grain rice is fluffier and drier than the short chubby grain, which tends to get gummy. Medium-grain rice (about as thick as it is long), after cooking retains a fairly distinct grain and also turns somewhat sticky, with individual grains that tend to be soft outside and firm at the core. I've made pudding with all three. Because one aspect of rice pudding of which I'm particularly fond is a bit of "bite" in the rice, a texture that contrasts well with the pudding's creamy consistency, I prefer the longer grain. Plus, the drier rice seems better at soaking up flavor, I've also used the slightly aromatic basmati rice, whose long, needle-like grains "cook-up" dry and each grain remains perfectly separate and distinct.

Brown rice is really just white rice with it's bran left on; it is rice that has undergone less milling and polishing than white. (I find many people think bran is a grain all it's own, like wheat or barley or oats. It isn't. Bran is the outer layer of any cereal grain.) Brown rice offers more fiber, has a chewier texture, and takes almost twice as long to cook as white. If your mom was a late 60's or 70's hippie (and your memory of her scent is patchouli) or what used to be called a "health nut" and cooked from Adelle Davis's Let's Cook It Right, she well may have made your rice pudding with brown rice and added chopped dates and coconut to the mixture and then baked it. She would have served it to you cut into squares so solid you could have used them as building blocks. The hippie and health nut moms of my acquaintance were milky, splendid earth mothers, loving and lots of fun with their kids, their food was good for you, but bad flavor and texture were often the cost of good nutrition.

White rice is what's left after milling and polishing: the starchy white endosperm, the plant version of a mammal's placental tissue. Most white rice, like white flour, is buttressed with vitamins and minerals to make up for nutrients left behind in milling.

There are two basic ways of cooking rice pudding: on top of the stove in a double boiler or by baking in the oven. I'm not a fan of the latter method, which is usually served cut, like a sheet cake, into squares. It's too dry, and many recipes turn out what looks like and tastes like gummy rice cake.

Making rice pudding gives you an excuse to buy a double boiler, a cooking utensil that comes in three parts: a lid and two saucepans, one small and one larger. The larger, base pan is filled with water and placed on a burner set to a medium flame. The second, smaller pan sits above and inside the bottom pot, surrounded by the water. The water is brought up to the simmering, not boiling, point. The steam that rises off the water heats, at a constant temperature, the contents of the smaller top pan. (You can improvise a double boiler with two saucepans, the larger of the two for the bottom half.)

Double boilers are helpful for any recipe that requires gentle and consistent heat. They do wonders when you want to warm up gravies, cream soups, and baby food, when you want to make the most delicate of scrambled eggs or melt chocolate or make sauces.

The nicest (and I suspect, priciest) double boiler are of tempered glass, such as Pyrex makes. A glass pan allows the cook to keep an eye on what's happening. With metal pans, there's always worry that the water will start a dangerous rolling boil or boil down to nothing.

When I was learning to cook, much of what went on in pots and pans seemed like an act of God. Why did cake rise or Jell-o jell or raw eggs thicken into scrambled eggs? I had no idea.

What causes rice pudding to thicken are the proteins in egg and to a lesser degree, in milk. The behavior of eggs in the kitchen, explains Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking, is mostly a matter of protein chemistry, and in particular the chemistry of coagulation. "When eggs are heated, the increased energy of all the molecules breaks some of the shaping bonds in the proteins, and individual protein molecules begin to unfold. This unfolding exposes more of each molecule's length to others and so makes bonding between different molecules more likely."

Egg, both white and yolk, is made up not just of protein in the singular, but proteins, in the plural, writes Howard Hillman in Kitchen Science. Each type coagulates at a different temperature in a zone ranging from slightly below 140 degrees F to slightly below 180 degrees F. A mixture like rice pudding, Hillman notes, "reaches its full glory when it is heated to slightly below 180 degrees F, the temperature at which all the proteins have finally coagulated. Above 185 degrees F, some of the proteins lose their coagulating effectiveness and your pudding starts to `weep', either in the kitchen or eventually on the dessert plate. Prolonged cooking, even below 180 degrees F, does the same damage."

Ted lay ensconced full-length on the flowered chintz sofa, pillows supporting his head and a quilt my daughter pieced together sheltering his trembly limbs. He showed mild interest when I explained the above to him.

Ted and his sister, orphaned when their parents died in a car crash, were reared from babyhood by a prim grandmother, the widow of a Presbyterian missionary. (I have seem the padded leather albums of photos from early in the century in which Ted's grandfather, garbed in black except for the white of his clerical collar, stands next to a thatched hut from whose door wide-eyed dark faces stare.)

Ted pushed off the quilt and pulled his skinny self into a sitting position. Ted excused himself and went to take a shower.

I walked back into the kitchen, which by then was balmy with the sweet fragrance of cooking rice. The one-half cup of rice that an hour earlier I'd put into a quart of milk in the top of my double boiler had fluffed up to perhaps two cups of rice, and the water in the bottom half of my double boiler was simmering. I lifted the lid. Steam rose. I added two tablespoons of unsalted butter and a half-cup of raisins to the rice and milk mixture. I broke into a mixing bowl two of the jumbo eggs and lightly whisked them - yolk and white - until they turned a pale lemony yellow. I added a half-cup of sugar and whisked some more, but, again, lightly, gently.

Then came, what's for me, the scary part: combining the egg-sugar mix with the hot rice and milk. Why this always scares me is if the rice and milk are too hot, over 150 degrees F, the eggs may curdle in the rice, leaving you with bits of scrambled egg in your rice pudding. Also, if you don't add the egg to the rice bit by bit, in small doses, you can also get the scrambled egg effect. So I told myself to calm down and be very, very patient and began, gradually, to stir cooked rice into the egg mixture.

Nothing bad happened. So I poured my big bowl full of the rice and eggs back into the top of the double boiler. Stirring constantly, but again, gently, with a big wooden spoon, I let the egg-rice fusion cook and thicken another five or so minutes.

While I stirred I thought about Ted, who was four when his mother died. How old Lydia was, I don't know, maybe two years older than Ted. Neither had ever been married. "I wouldn't want to," Ted said once, "and Lydia doesn't want to either. And even if we did want to, we both think it's too late. We're too set now in our own ways." Ted lives in an airy eastside Manhattan apartment whose walls he's papered forest green. A wedding photograph of his parents, smiling and soaking up each other's glance, sits on his parlor grand. He makes his living as an accompanist for singers. Lydia lives in Brooklyn. They see each other on weekends. Their parents were drunk when they died; Ted and Lydia never in their whole lives have drunk so much as one beer. Their celebratory drink is Pepsi.

I took the top pan off the bottom pan and placed it on the counter to cool. Some people like to add nutmeg or cinnamon to rice pudding. I don't. I like the egg and milk and rice, each tasting so strongly of itself, hidden under a blight of prickly spice. I want, at most, a muted, vanilla-scented background I stirred in one teaspoon of vanilla and watched the dark brown extract disappear into the pudding. The egg yolks and vanilla turned the pudding the color fresh snow turns under an eleven-in-the-morning slant of sunshine.

Ted, after his shower, declared himself somewhat restored. But he felt rubbery, he said, in the legs. We wrapped him up again in the quilt, and I brought him a bowl of the still warm pudding. "Mmmm," he said, mouth full with his first taste, and then said nothing until his bowl was empty, when he said "Thank you so much." Later that afternoon, apropos, apparently, of nothing, Ted said, "My mother would have turned 70 this year."