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Rice, Boiled, to Serve as a Vegetable with Hot Meat
Wash half a pint of rice in several waters until the water is clear. Drain it, and put it into a saucepan with a pint of cold water, a pinch of salt, and a piece of butter the size of a pea. Let it boil gently until it is tender and quite dry. Serve in a vegetable tureen. Or, wash the rice, and tie it loosely in a cloth, leaving room for it to swell to four times its bulk. Put it into boiling water, and keep it boiling until done enough. Lift it upon a sieve, drain it, untie the string, and shake the rice into a vegetable-dish. Stir with a fork to separate the grains, and add a slice of butter and a little pepper and salt. Time, with the cloth, an hour and a half; without the cloth, half an hour.
Two methods for the same dish: an absorption boil and a pudding-cloth boil. The first is close to modern practice; the second is a relic and the timings are the part to distrust.
- The measurementsCassell's works in imperial volume: half a pint of rice is about 10 fl oz, or roughly 1 1/4 US cups, and the pint of water is 20 fl oz. That is a 2:1 water-to-rice ratio by volume, which still works for long-grain rice.
- Butter the size of a peaOne of the informal size comparisons Victorian books use, amounting to a quarter-teaspoon or less. In the first method the quantity is too small to enrich the dish; the more generous "slice of butter" comes at the end of the second method.
- Half an hour is too longModern long-grain white rice absorbs its water in 15 to 18 minutes off a bare simmer, with 10 minutes covered and off the heat afterward. Whatever the reason for the longer time given here, thirty minutes on today's rice risks a pan of mush.
- The cloth methodAn hour and a half in a cloth is far beyond anything a modern grain needs, and the cloth's main service is to contain the rice so it can be lifted and drained in one go. If you want separate grains, boil loose in plenty of salted water and drain.
- Washing until the water runs clearStill the right instruction, and the hinge of the first method. Rinsing off surface starch is what keeps absorption-cooked rice from turning gluey. Drain it well, since clinging rinse water throws off the ratio.
- Boil gently, coveredBoil gently -- The original says only to boil gently and gives no instruction about a lid. Modern absorption practice is to bring it to a boil, drop to the lowest simmer with the lid on and leave it alone; lifting the lid or stirring releases steam and breaks grains.
- YieldAbout 3 1/2 cups cooked, enough as a side for four.
Rice appears twice over in books of this period — as a sweet pudding and, as here, as a plain starch set on the table in its own covered tureen beside the meat, in the place a modern menu would give potatoes. The distinction the title draws looks deliberate: Cassell's readers may well have known rice chiefly boiled in milk with sugar, so a savoury version arguably needed spelling out. The cloth method is often said to derive from pudding cookery, where a range of dishes went into the boiling copper tied in linen; the instruction to leave room for the rice to swell "to four times its bulk" is the sort of hard-won detail that suggests plenty of cooks had split a cloth. British rice at this date came largely from India and the American South, sold as Patna or Carolina, and is generally thought to have arrived far drier and harder than anything milled today, which may go some way towards explaining cooking times that now read as excessive.