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Rice-Water, for Invalids
Wash two ounces of rice in several waters, boil it gently for two hours and a half, and stir frequently. Strain it through a fine sieve, and rub through the glutinous part, but not that which is firm. When the liquor is cold it is ready for use. A table-spoonful of raisins is sometimes boiled with the rice. If the water is wanted quickly, boil three ounces of rice for half an hour in a quart of water.
A sickroom drink rather than a dish, and the sort of thing every Victorian kitchen was expected to be able to produce at short notice. The instructions are workable, but the first method leaves out the one number you need.
- The missing measurementThe long method gives 2 oz rice and no quantity of water at all; only the quick version specifies a quart. For two and a half hours of gentle simmering you will need considerably more than a quart to start with, and topping up as it reduces is unavoidable. The original is genuinely silent on this point.
- WeightsTwo ounces of rice is about a third of a cup; three ounces is a scant half cup. A quart in a British book of this period is 40 fl oz, not the American 32.
- Which riceOrdinary long or short grain white rice is what is meant. Parboiled and quick-cooking rices will not break down and give up their starch the same way, and brown rice keeps its bran intact — neither suits the purpose.
- The hinge: rub through, don't push throughThe instruction to pass the soft glutinous part through the sieve but leave the firm grains behind is what separates rice-water from thin gruel. Forcing the whole lot through gives a gritty, pasty drink; a light hand with the back of a spoon gives the smooth opalescent liquid intended.
- Stirring and scorchingTwo and a half hours of simmering with a small amount of rice will catch and scorch on the base unless the heat is genuinely low and the pan heavy. "Stir frequently" is not optional advice here.
- The raisinsA tablespoon of raisins boiled in adds sweetness and a little colour. The recipe offers it as an occasional variation ('sometimes'), not as standard practice. Strain them out with the rice; the instruction to strain implies they are not meant to be eaten.
- Yield and keepingNo yield can be stated for the long method, since the original gives no quantity of water. It is a fresh preparation — make it in small quantities, refrigerate, and discard within a day, since a starchy unsweetened liquid at room temperature spoils quickly.
- ServingTake it cool, as directed, or barely warm. Lemon peel boiled with the rice, or a spoonful of sugar, appear in other invalid-cookery preparations of the period and would not alter the character of the drink; this recipe calls for neither.
Invalid cookery occupied a fixed place in nineteenth-century household manuals, and this book is no exception: beef tea, barley water, arrowroot, whey and rice-water form a small standard repertoire aimed at people who could keep down little else. Rice-water in particular was recommended for bowel complaints, on the long-standing belief that rice was binding — a notion that survives in modern advice about bland starchy foods during gastrointestinal illness, though the older reasoning rested on ideas about binding and cooling foods rather than on nutrition. The technique itself is far older and much travelled: starchy rice cooking liquid is drunk in its own right across much of Asia, and rice congee and its strained liquor were familiar sickroom fare in Anglo-Indian households, though how far that route shaped the British version is not established. The two methods given here — the patient two-and-a-half-hour simmer and the half-hour version "if the water is wanted quickly" — suit a household in which a soothing drink might be wanted at short notice.