Home › Vegetables › Rice
Rice
To boil rice: Wash the rice until the water is clear; then add to two cups of rice, four of boiling water, boil it ten minutes, adding a little salt; then boil five minutes more, and if all the water has not boiled away remove the cover and place the dish by the side of the fire, where the rice can dry; as soon as all the water disappears the rice should be dished. Rice should never be stirred while boiling, as stirring will cause it to stick or adhere to the dish.
A straightforward absorption method that still works, with a few assumptions worth naming. The instruction that matters is the last one: leave it alone.
- Do not stirThe original is right, though the reasoning is loose. Stirring breaks the grains and releases surface starch, which is what makes the rice gluey and makes it catch on the bottom. Lid on, no spoon, until it is done.
- The ratioTwo cups rice to four cups water is a 1:2 absorption ratio, which suits long-grain white rice. Modern American long-grain often needs slightly less, closer to 1:1.75; basmati less again after soaking. Brown rice will not cook in fifteen minutes at any ratio.
- WashingRinsing until the water runs clear removes loose surface starch and, in the period, mill dust and talc coatings. It still improves separation of the grains, though enriched American rice loses some of its added vitamins in the process.
- "By the side of the fire"This is the cool zone of a coal or wood range, roughly a very low burner. Once the water is gone, the lidless pan sits over the lowest possible heat, or simply off the heat, so residual steam finishes the grains.
- Total timeFifteen minutes of boiling is at the short end. Give white long-grain a full simmer of 15-18 minutes covered, then 10 minutes off the heat with the lid on before fluffing with a fork.
- SaltThe recipe adds it partway through, which is arbitrary; add roughly a teaspoon per two cups of rice with the water at the start.
- YieldTwo cups of raw rice gives about six cups cooked, enough for six to eight as a side dish.
Rice appears among the vegetables rather than the starches in a number of American cookbooks of this period, and the boiling method given here is the plain "Carolina" style: white long-grain, cooked in measured water until dry, with the grains kept separate. That standard of separateness was a point of pride and a frequent subject of complaint in nineteenth-century household writing, where soggy rice was treated as a mark of a careless cook. The rice itself would most likely have come from the Carolina and Georgia lowcountry, or from the newer plantings in Louisiana and Texas that are generally said to have displaced the older Atlantic crop around the turn of the century. The warning against stirring recurs in other books of the era, which suggests it was received wisdom passed between compilers as much as anything learned at the stove.