Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rice Savoury
Rice Savoury
No. 1.--Wash a pound of rice, and put it into a saucepan with three pints of water, a red herring freed from skin and bone and torn into flakes, three ounces of bacon (fat and lean together) cut into dice, a few peppercorns, and a small sprig of thyme and parsley. Let the water boil, then draw the saucepan to the side of the fire, and let the rice simmer gently until it is tender and has absorbed the liquor. Turn it upon a dish, and serve hot. Time, three-quarters of an hour to one hour. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for eight or nine persons. No. 2.--Wash half a pound of best Carolina rice, throw it into boiling water, and let it boil quickly for ten minutes. Drain it, and put it into a saucepan with half a pint of good gravy, two ounces of fresh butter, a tea-spoonful of chutney, a dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice, the thin rind of half a lemon, a tea-spoonful of salt, a tea-spoonful of sugar, half a tea-spoonful of white pepper, and half a tea-spoonful of grated nutmeg. Stir the rice well, and simmer gently until it is tender and has absorbed the liquor. Serve very hot. Time, three-quarters to one hour. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
Two absorption-method rice dishes from the same entry: one a smoked-fish supper, the other a spiced buttered rice. Both are sound, but the timings belong to an era of hard, slow-cooking rice.
- The timing is the main thing to changeThree-quarters of an hour to an hour will reduce modern long-grain rice to paste. Once the liquid is at a bare simmer and the pan covered, 18-20 minutes will see it tender, followed by 10 minutes off the heat to finish absorbing. Judge by the rice, not the clock.
- Red herringNot a figure of speech but a whole herring cured hard in salt and cold-smoked to a deep mahogany. It is ferociously salty and dry. If you can find one (Dutch and Italian delis sometimes stock them), soak it in cold water or milk for several hours first, and add no salt to the dish at all. A couple of good smoked kippers are the nearest easy substitute, and need no soaking.
- Liquid ratio in No. 1Three pints to a pound of rice is roughly 3 cups of water to each cup of rice — generous by modern standards. Start with 2 1/2 pints and add more if the pan runs dry before the grains are tender.
- "Draw the saucepan to the side of the fire"On a range, this meant moving the pot off the hot plate to a cooler part of the hob. Translate as: bring to the boil, then reduce to the lowest simmer your burner will hold, and cover.
- Carolina riceThe long-grain rice grown in the South Carolina lowcountry, prized in Britain for cooking up separate and dry. It is no longer a commercial crop in the old sense, though it has been revived on a small scale; any good long-grain white rice will stand in, and basmati will serve if you don't mind its stronger perfume.
- "Good gravy" in No. 2Not thickened pan gravy but clear brown meat stock or the strained juices from a roast. Half a pint to half a pound of rice looks short, though the ten-minute boil beforehand has already hydrated the grain; be ready to add more stock or water if the pan dries before the rice is tender.
- Lemon rind"Thin rind" means pared with a knife in strips, no white pith. Take the pieces out before serving; they are there to perfume the rice, not to be eaten.
- ChutneyIn a Victorian English kitchen this usually meant a sweet, spiced mango chutney of the Anglo-Indian type, though other sorts were sold. A teaspoonful with the nutmeg, sugar and pepper puts the dish squarely in the mulligatawny-and-kedgeree family.
- YieldThe stated eight or nine portions from a pound of rice assumes it is one dish among several at a plain supper. As a main course, No. 1 feeds four to five and No. 2 three to four.
Both versions are pilaf logic dressed in English clothes: rice cooked in a measured amount of flavoured liquid until it has drunk the lot, rather than boiled loose and drained. The pair demonstrates the absorption method twice over — once cheaply, with the salt fish and bacon many households kept in store, and once richly, with butter, stock and spice. The costings tell the story of who each was for: ninepence for eight or nine people is genuinely poor-man's food, while a shilling for five or six, with fresh butter and good gravy, is a middle-class supper dish. The second recipe's chutney, nutmeg and lemon mark it as a cousin of kedgeree and the other Anglo-Indian rice dishes that came home with returning Company families and settled permanently into the British breakfast and supper table during the nineteenth century.