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RICE, BOILED, PLAIN (Soyer's recipe)
Put two quarts of water into a stewpan, with a tea-spoonful of salt; when boiling, add to it half a pound of rice well washed; boil for ten minutes, or till each grain becomes rather soft; drain it into a colander, slightly grease the pot with butter, and put the rice back into it; let it swell slowly for about twenty minutes near the fire, or in a slow oven. Each grain will then swell up, and be well separated; it is then ready for use.
Soyer's two-stage method — a hard boil in abundant salted water, then a slow steam-swell off the heat — predates the absorption method most cooks use now, and it still works well for long-grain rice.
- Scale and yieldHalf a pound is about 1 1/4 cups of raw rice; two quarts is 8 cups of water. Cooked, this makes roughly four to six side-dish servings.
- Which riceThis suits long-grain white rice, the kind sold in Victorian Britain as Patna or Carolina. Basmati works. Do not use short-grain, arborio or converted rice, which behave quite differently in an open boil.
- Washing mattersRinsing until the water runs clear removes surface starch, which is what makes grains clump. Rinse in several changes of cold water.
- Ten minutes is a starting pointThe recipe itself allows 'ten minutes, or till each grain becomes rather soft'. Start testing at seven minutes; the grain should still have a firm core, since it finishes cooking during the swelling stage.
- A slow ovenRoughly 250–300F. Cover the pot loosely — a lid or a folded cloth under the lid keeps the steam in without dripping condensation back onto the grains.
- "Near the fire"The equivalent is the lowest setting on a burner with a heat diffuser, or simply a covered pot set in a warm oven. The rice should steam, not fry, in the buttered pot.
- Buttering the potA film of butter stops the bottom layer sticking and gives a faint richness. Use enough to coat, not enough to pool.
Alexis Soyer (1810–1858) was chef at the Reform Club in London and the best-known cook in Victorian Britain, as much for his public work — soup kitchens during the Irish famine, and the reform of army field cooking in the Crimea — as for his books. Cassell's borrowed freely from named authorities, and Soyer's name on a method was a mark of reliability. Boiling rice in a large volume of water and then drying it out is a technique often associated with British contact with India; it appears in English cookery books through the nineteenth century as the corrective to the older habit of boiling rice to a pudding-like mush. The insistence that each grain be "well separated" may be read as reflecting a period preoccupation with rice as a savoury accompaniment to curry rather than as a milk pudding, which was its more familiar role in the English kitchen.