Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rice, Indian Mode of Boiling
Rice, Indian Mode of Boiling
Wash a pound of rice, pick out the discoloured grains, and soak it for a quarter of an hour. Drain, and put it into a saucepan with as much boiling water as will thoroughly cover it. Cover the saucepan, let the rice boil for six minutes, add a quarter of a pint of milk, and boil two minutes longer. Strain the rice, and return it to the saucepan to dry. Pour over it half an ounce of butter dissolved in a spoonful of the water in which the rice was boiled. In five minutes it will be ready for serving. In the East Indies and China the water in which rice is boiled is called congy-water, and is prescribed by medical men there as nourishing food for sick persons. It is, in fact, rice gruel. Time, about three-quarters of an hour.
A straightforward boil-and-dry method that works well, provided the timings are treated as a starting point rather than gospel. The hinge is the final drying stage: drained rice returned to a dry pan over the lowest heat for a few minutes is what separates the grains.
- The quarter-pint of milkAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, a scant 2/3 cup. It is added near the end to soften the grain and lend a little richness, not to cook the rice, so it should not be increased.'
- Total boiling timeSix minutes plus two is short for most rice sold now. Long-grain white rice generally needs 10-12 minutes at a rolling boil; taste a grain before draining. The eight minutes given suggests a softer, older milling that cooked faster.
- "Time, about three-quarters of an hour"That figure covers the whole process, including washing, the quarter-hour soak, draining and the resting-and-drying stage, not just the boiling. Active cooking is under twenty minutes.
- Washing and picking overRinsing until the water runs clear removes surface starch and is still worth doing for separate grains. Picking out discoloured grains and grit mattered when rice arrived unsorted; packaged rice needs no sorting.
- SoakingFifteen minutes is optional for long-grain rice but genuinely helpful for basmati, which cooks more evenly and lengthens if soaked. If you soak, reduce the boiling time by a couple of minutes.
- Draining and drying"Strain" means drain in a sieve or colander, then return the rice to the dry hot pan off strong heat, lid on, to steam and firm up. This is the step that decides the texture.
- Half an ounce of butterAbout one tablespoon for a pound of dry rice. Loosening it with a spoonful of the cooking liquid helps it coat the grains rather than sit in a pool.
- YieldA pound of dry rice is roughly 2 1/3 cups and yields six to eight servings as a side dish.
- On the congee noteThe cooking water described here is thin starch water, not the thick rice porridge sold as congee, which is grains simmered to collapse in a great deal of liquid. Treat the closing remark as period medical opinion rather than instruction.
Cassell's presents this as the "Indian mode". The draining method, with the grains finished dry and separate, is generally traced to Victorian kitchens by way of returning Anglo-Indian households, and cookery writers of the period are often said to have held it up as the correct way to treat rice as a savoury accompaniment. The note on congy-water preserves an older transliteration of the Tamil kanji, the root of the English word congee; rice water was widely prescribed for invalids in both Asian and European practice in the nineteenth century, and its reputation as light nourishment for the sick is traditional rather than a claim this book examines.