Boiled Rice
Wash one cup of rice, drain and add slowly to three quarts boiling salted water so as not to stop water boiling. Boil rapidly until rice is tender (twenty to twenty-five minutes). Drain in a sieve, pour over cold water to separate kernels. Turn into double boiler, and cover with a crash towel; keep hot over hot water.
A pasta-style method for rice: lots of water, hard boil, drain, rinse. It produces dry separate grains rather than the moist absorbed-water rice most cooks make today.
- The hingeAdd the rice slowly enough that the water never comes off the boil. If it stalls, the grains sit in warm water and start to release starch, which is exactly what this method is trying to avoid.
- TimingTwenty to twenty-five minutes is long by modern standards; period rice was less processed. Modern American long-grain is usually tender in 12 to 15 minutes; start tasting at 10 and drain the moment the centre loses its chalk.
- SaltThe recipe does not say how much. Seasoning it as you would pasta water, roughly a tablespoon per quart, is a reasonable reading; almost all of it goes down the drain either way.
- The cold rinseRinsing washes off surface starch and stops the cooking, but it also cools the rice, which is why the recipe immediately puts it back over hot water. If you want the rice hot straight away, skip the rinse and simply shake the sieve dry.
- Crash towelCrash was a coarse loose-woven linen. Its job is to absorb the steam rising off the rice so condensation does not drip back and make it gummy. Any clean thin cotton or linen cloth, or a couple of layers of paper towel under the lid, does the same.
- Double boilerIf you have no double boiler, set a metal bowl or the covered pan over a wider pan of barely simmering water. The rice will hold this way for half an hour or more without turning to paste.
- YieldOne cup of raw rice gives about three cups cooked, enough for four as a side dish or as a bed for a stew or curry.
Boiling rice in a large volume of water and draining it is the older English and American technique, and it appears in books like this one as the standard way to get what nineteenth-century writers called "every grain distinct." It is the same logic behind South Asian and Persian methods that parboil and drain rice before finishing it, and it contrasts with the measured-water absorption method that came to dominate American home cooking in the twentieth century, a shift associated with the spread of packaged converted rice and later electric rice cookers, which made a fixed water ratio the norm. The crash towel and double boiler are the tell that this is a Sunday-dinner book: the rice is made ahead and held while the rest of the meal comes together, at least on this page.