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Cream of Rice Soup
1 cup rice, well washed. 1½ quarts cold water. 1 onion sliced. 2 cups hot cream or milk. 1/4 cup butter. 2 tablespoons flour. 1 green pepper cut in shreds.
Salt, cayenne and nutmeg. 1 teaspoon finely chopped parsley.
PROCESS: Heat water to boiling, season with salt and add rice, onion and green pepper (discarding seeds and veins). Cook until rice is soft; rub through a sieve. Melt butter in a saucepan, add flour, stir to a smooth paste, add cream slowly, stirring constantly. Add seasonings and cook over hot water ten minutes. Combine with rice mixture, continue cooking five minutes. Turn into hot soup tureen and sprinkle over with parsley.
A straightforward purée soup built on two separate operations — a rice broth and a butter-flour-cream base — brought together at the end. The points below cover the one broken measurement and the places where modern equipment changes the work.
- Water quantityThe printed page gives 1½ quarts of cold water to a cup of rice, which is what our text now reads. That is ample liquid for a soup meant to be rubbed through a sieve; add a little more if the rice absorbs it before turning soft.
- Cream vs. milk"Hot cream or milk" in a book of this period most likely means an ordinary table cream, nearer today's half-and-half than heavy cream, though cream was not standardised and richness varied. Half-and-half gives a plausible body; whole milk makes a thinner, cleaner-tasting soup.
- Rubbing through a sieveThis is the step the original assumes will take real effort. A blender or immersion blender does it in under a minute, though a pass through a fine sieve afterward still catches the pepper skins and gives the smoother texture the recipe is after.
- "Cook over hot water"A double boiler, to keep the cream sauce from catching or breaking during its ten minutes. A heavy saucepan over low heat with regular stirring works, but the double boiler is genuinely more forgiving with a cream sauce.
- Seasoning amountsSalt, cayenne and nutmeg are left to judgment, as was standard. Start with about 1/2 teaspoon salt in the cream base, a pinch of cayenne and no more than a scant 1/8 teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg — nutmeg dominates a mild rice purée very quickly.
- Rice timingLong-grain white rice will be soft enough to sieve in 20–25 minutes; the recipe wants it overcooked, not al dente, so err long. Avoid parboiled or converted rice, which resists breaking down.
- Consistency at the endSieved rice thickens considerably as it sits and again when the roux-based cream goes in. Hold back some of the cooking liquid and thin the finished soup to taste before it goes to the table.
- YieldPerhaps six servings as a first course, assuming the larger reading of the water quantity.
Cream soups of this kind — a starchy vegetable or grain cooked soft, pushed through a sieve, then married to a butter-and-flour cream sauce — were a common American first course in the decades either side of 1900. The method derives from the French potage-purée tradition, simplified for a household kitchen without a stockpot always on the fire: rice supplies both body and flavor, so no meat broth is needed. The shredded green pepper and the cayenne read as American rather than French touches, giving a pale soup a little color and heat.