Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rice Soup, Brown
Rice Soup, Brown
Take two ounces of Patna rice, boiled as for curry, but left until cold. Put it into a baking-tin with a little melted butter; set it in the oven, and bake it until golden brown all over, and the butter absorbed. It must be turned about from time to time. Meanwhile, peel, mince, and fry an onion in a little more butter until nearly tender; drain it and put it in a pan, with the rice, a quart of stock, a tea-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, and a table-spoonful of tomato ketchup. Boil till the onion is quite soft, and serve hot. Probable cost, 8d., excluding the stock.
A thin, savoury soup that depends almost entirely on two things: how far you brown the rice, and how good the stock is. The recipe is simple, but both quantities and vessels need translating.
- The hinge is the browningThe toasted rice carries most of the flavour of the soup, and it can go from golden to acrid quickly. The recipe specifies no oven temperature or time, only that it be baked until golden brown all over with the butter absorbed, and turned about from time to time; a moderate oven and frequent checking are the safest reading.
- "Boiled as for curry"Victorian shorthand for rice boiled in plenty of salted water, drained, and left dry and separate rather than absorbent-method or creamy. Cooling it first matters: damp warm rice steams in the tin instead of toasting.
- Patna riceA long-grain rice named for the Indian city, the standard "curry rice" of the period. Any plain long-grain rice works; basmati is closest in grain but more aromatic than the original intends.
- QuantitiesTwo ounces is about 1/3 cup of raw rice. An imperial quart of stock is 40 imperial fl oz, a little under 5 US cups -- noticeably more than a US quart, and the difference shows in a soup this thin.
- Mushroom ketchupA dark, salty, unsweetened mushroom-and-salt liquor, not a sauce in the modern sense. It is still sold by a few British makers; a teaspoon of soy sauce plus a little Worcestershire gives a fair approximation of its function as a savoury darkener.
- Tomato ketchup, then and nowThe Victorian article was thinner, sharper and generally less sweet than a modern squeeze bottle. Use a tablespoon of tomato puree let down with water, or halve the modern ketchup, or the soup turns sugary.
- StockWith no thickening, no cream and no meat, everything rests on the stock. A good brown beef or veal stock is what the recipe assumes; a weak cube leaves you with brown water and rice.
- Yield and servingFive cups of liquid serves four as a first course. The rice softens and clouds the soup on standing, so serve it as soon as the onion is tender.
This belongs to a large family of late-Victorian "brown" soups, where colour and savour came not from long-reduced meat glaze but from browned starch and a bottled seasoning or two -- the economical end of the repertoire, as the eightpence noted at the close makes plain. The toasting of rice in butter before it meets liquid is a technique with much older roots in Indian and Persian cooking, and Patna rice had reached British kitchens through the East India trade as the default grain for curry and pilau. Mushroom ketchup, meanwhile, was the ordinary umami bottle of the English larder well before tomato ketchup displaced it, and this recipe calls for both at once -- the mushroom for depth, the tomato for a sharpness and colour that beef stock alone would not give.