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Thick Rice Soup
2 pints water or stock Salt and pepper to taste 2 small onions 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful rice 1 cupful canned tomatoes, or 4 fresh ones Wash and drain rice. Heat Crisco in saucepan, add rice and stir constantly until a golden brown. Now add water or stock, onions and tomatoes cut in small pieces, and seasonings. Cook slowly for one hour.
A pilaf-style soup: the rice is toasted in fat before liquid goes in, which is what gives it flavour and keeps the grains distinct. Everything else is straightforward, though the timing belongs to an older kind of rice.
- The hinge: brown the rice properlyStir the rice in the hot fat until it is genuinely golden and smells nutty, not merely translucent. This toasting is the whole character of the soup; rushed, the result is watery rice porridge.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote it, and it is still sold. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works — 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil, or butter if you want more flavour, though butter will brown faster than the rice does.
- Measures2 pints is 4 cups of liquid to 1 cup of rice — generous, because the original expects long cooking and evaporation. Keep a little extra stock at hand if it tightens too far.
- An hour is too longModern long-grain rice is soft in 18-20 minutes; simmering it an hour will collapse it into starch. Cook 25-30 minutes at a bare simmer and judge by the grain, adding liquid as needed.
- The onions"2 small onions" left whole would be odd here; the instruction to cut the tomatoes small implies the same for the onions. Dice them and add with the liquid, or soften them in the fat before the rice goes in.
- TomatoesOne cup of canned tomatoes with their juice, or four fresh ones, peeled and chopped. If yours are large, two medium may come closer to the intended volume.
- YieldAbout four modest bowls. It thickens considerably on standing and will need loosening with stock when reheated.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to put Crisco — introduced in 1911 and marketed as the first all-vegetable shortening — into American home cooking. That accounts for the fat appearing by brand name in a soup that scarcely needs it: the book's recipes call for Crisco throughout. The technique is not original to the book; browning rice in fat before adding liquid is standard across Spanish, Levantine and Indian cooking. Canned tomatoes, offered here as the first option rather than a fallback, mark the period as clearly as the Crisco does: by the 1910s commercially canned tomatoes were cheap and widely available year round.