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Rice Panada
Take one pound of rice, previously washed, and boil it in one gallon of water for an hour; add three-quarters of an ounce of sugar and two ounces of salt; mix with some cold water to make a thin paste, one pound of flour or oat-meal, and half an ounce of curry-powder; add it to the rice, and boil for twenty minutes; then serve.
This is bulk cookery rather than a family dish: a gallon of liquid thickened twice over, first with rice and then with flour or oatmeal. Read the salt figure carefully before you start.
- The hinge: add the flour as a cold slurryThe instruction to mix the flour or oatmeal with cold water to a thin paste before it goes near the pot is the whole technique. Tipped in dry it will seize into lumps that twenty minutes of boiling will not break up.
- Two ounces of salt is a lotThat is roughly 3 tablespoons of table salt against three-quarters of an ounce of sugar (about 1 1/2 tablespoons) in a gallon. The proportion is deliberate for a savoury gruel, but it lands near the upper limit of palatability for modern tastes; a third of it is closer to how a soup would be seasoned today.
- ScorchingA gallon of rice and flour on a modern flat-bottomed pan over gas or induction will catch on the base long before the flour is cooked out. Use the widest heavy pot you have, keep it at a bare simmer, and stir down to the bottom every few minutes.
- An hour is not a mistakeModern long-grain rice is done in 15 minutes, but the point here is to burst the grains into a thick pap, not to keep them separate. Short-grain or broken rice does this best; basmati resists it.
- Oatmeal instead of flourIf you take the oatmeal option, use pinhead or medium oatmeal rather than rolled oats, which dissolve and give a slicker texture. The result is nearer a savoury porridge than a soup.
- Curry-powder of the periodA Victorian curry powder was typically built on turmeric, coriander and fenugreek, generally with only mild heat. Half an ounce is roughly 2 tablespoons, about 6 teaspoons; a modern hot Madras blend at that rate will dominate the dish.
- YieldAbout a gallon before evaporation, so 12 to 16 bowls. Halve or quarter it unless you are actually feeding a crowd, and expect it to set almost solid once cold.
Panada comes from the Latin panis, bread, and originally meant exactly that: bread boiled soft in water or broth, one of the oldest sickroom foods in European cookery. By the nineteenth century the name had loosened to cover any thin farinaceous gruel. The scale gives its purpose away: a pound of rice and a pound of flour in a gallon of water reads as a costed ration rather than a family dish, the kind of quantity associated with institutional feeding, though the recipe itself says nothing about who it was for. The curry powder is doing cheap work here, giving an otherwise blank porridge some flavour, and by the later nineteenth century curry powder was widely available in British kitchens.