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RICE SOUP (suitable for children or sick persons)
Wash four ounces of rice in three or four waters, drain it, and boil it gently with two quarts of beef or veal stock until it is tender without being broken. Season with a little salt and white pepper, and if the stock is already seasoned, be careful that it is not served too salt, owing to evaporation. If clear soup is wanted, the rice can be boiled separately in water until the grains are tender without being broken, then dropped into the clear soup, and allowed to remain a few minutes without simmering, or the rice may be boiled in thin, nicely-flavoured stock, strained, and put into the soup-tureen, the clear soup being then poured over it. Time, one hour. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A plain invalid-cookery soup that still works as written, provided you watch the salt and the rice grain.
- Rice choiceFour ounces is about 115 g, roughly two-thirds of a cup of long-grain rice. "Tender without being broken" points away from short-grain or risotto types, which shed starch and cloud the stock; Carolina-style long grain or basmati holds its shape.
- The hour is too longThe hour is long -- Modern long-grain rice is tender in 15-18 minutes in stock, and will soften to paste if held at a boil for an hour. Judge by the grain, not the clock.
- Salt and evaporationThis is the hinge of the recipe. Two quarts of stock reducing over a long simmer concentrates whatever salt is already there, so season only at the end, and use unsalted or low-sodium stock if you are starting from a carton.
- The clear-soup methodFor the consommé version, cook the rice separately, rinse the surface starch off under hot water, and add it to the hot soup off the heat for a few minutes. Any starch carried across will veil the clarity the method exists to protect.
- Washing in three or four watersNot fussiness. Rinsing until the water runs near-clear removes loose surface starch and is what keeps the broth from turning cloudy or slippery.
- Veal stockVeal stock was the standard neutral base of the period, valued for body from the gelatine and almost no flavour of its own. A light chicken stock is the nearest thing most kitchens will have.
- YieldSix to eight as a first course, or four as the whole of a light supper. It thickens noticeably on standing; loosen with more stock, not water.
Rice soup belongs to the nineteenth-century category of invalid cookery, a section commonly found in household manuals of the period, where the aim was nourishment that a weak stomach could manage rather than anything a cook would boast of. Beef and veal stock were understood as restoratives in themselves, close cousins to the beef teas and calf's-foot jellies that fill the same chapters, and rice was regarded as the mildest of the starches. It was evidently treated as a method to be varied: the thick version served for the sickroom and the clear version, with the grains dropped into consommé at the last moment, for the dinner table.