Fry 1 large chopped onion with 2 cups of tomatoes; add 1 cup of stock, salt and pepper to taste. Cover and let simmer ten minutes; then add 2 cups of boiled rice. Mix well together with 1 tablespoonful of butter. Let get very hot and serve.
September 10 — No. 10
Spanish
A short skillet dish built on leftovers: cooked rice, canned or stewed tomatoes, and a little stock. The text is compressed almost to shorthand, so a few things need filling in.
- The missing fat"Fry 1 large chopped onion" gives no fat and no pan. Use a wide skillet or saucepan with a tablespoon or two of butter or oil, and cook the onion over medium heat until soft and just golden, about 6-8 minutes, before the tomatoes go in.
- 2 cups of tomatoesIn a household cookbook of this kind the two cups most likely means canned or home-put-up tomatoes with their liquid, near enough one standard can. Fresh tomatoes work but are wetter and less concentrated; peel, seed and chop them, and expect to simmer longer than ten minutes.
- Boiled riceThe recipe assumes cooked rice already in the house, which is why nothing is measured raw. Two cups cooked is about two-thirds of a cup dry. Day-old refrigerated rice holds its grain far better than freshly boiled rice, which turns to paste when stirred into sauce.
- StockAny light meat stock; chicken or veal suits it. Canned low-sodium broth is the direct substitute, and salt at the end rather than the beginning since the stock and tomatoes both carry salt.
- Don't overwork itThe hinge is the final mixing. Fold the rice in with the butter and let it heat through undisturbed for two or three minutes; repeated stirring breaks the grains and the dish goes gluey.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper only, as written, which is plain by modern taste. A pinch of paprika or a little sweet pepper cooked with the onion would not be out of place, though the book asks for neither.
- YieldAbout four cups finished — two generous servings as a main, four as a side.
Spanish rice, along with its close relatives Mexican rice and "red rice," is one of those American dishes named for a country that would not recognise it. Nineteenth-century Anglo-American cooks used "Spanish" as shorthand for anything cooked with tomatoes, onions and peppers; the label attached itself to tomato-tinted rice and stuck for a century of church suppers and school cafeterias. The version here is the thrifty form: not a pilaf where raw rice absorbs the flavoured liquid, but a way to reheat cooked rice left from another meal, which is exactly the sort of economy a day-a-page household cookbook was built to supply. Note its neighbours in the book, Polish soup among them, a reminder that national flavour here is what an American cook imagined it to be, rather than any attempt at authenticity.