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Boiled Rice (Cup rice cups boiling water)
1/2 cup rice 6 cups boiling water 2 teaspoons salt Put the rice into a small saucepan, pour hot water over it, whip with a batter whip, and pour off the water. Pour on more hot water, whip again, and pour off the water. Repeat the process till the rice is thoroughly clean, and the water that is poured off is clear. Have the six cups of water salted and actively boiling over the fire. Stir the washed rice into it. Keep the rice actively boiling for twenty minutes, stirring occasionally, to prevent its sticking to the bottom of the kettle, then turn it into a colander to drain off the water. Hold the colander containing the rice under the cold water faucet, and run a large quantity of cold water through the rice till all the stickiness is washed from the kernels, so that they remain separate and distinct. Then, after the rice is thoroughly drained, put it into a double boiler to dry and reheat. Do not stir the rice while it is reheating, and in dishing it out handle it very carefully so as not to break the kernels or cause them to stick together. Serve with cream or fruit sauce.
This is a wasteful method of cooking rice, if the water is thrown away, but it is very difficult to cook rice any other way and have the kernels separate. The water in which the rice has been boiled may be used in making soup, and thus the nourishment it contains is saved.
Natural brown rice requires longer to cook than white rice. It should boil twenty-five minutes, or till the kernels are tender.
A late-Victorian method for separate-grained rice: boil hard in a large volume of salted water, rinse cold, then steam dry. It works, and the rinse is the step that does the work.
- Ratio and yieldHalf a cup of raw rice in six cups of water serves two to three as a side dish, yielding roughly 1 1/2 cups cooked. The water is a cooking medium here, not an absorption measure, so the proportion can be scaled freely as long as the rice swims.
- Batter whipA batter whip is a stiff wire whisk. A hand or a spoon does the washing just as well; the point is to agitate the grains until the rinse water runs clear of loose starch.
- Twenty minutes is long for modern riceToday's milled long-grain white rice is done in 10 to 12 minutes at a hard boil. Test a grain at 10 minutes and drain when just tender, or the kernels will split, which defeats the whole purpose of the method. The 25 minutes given for brown rice is closer to right, though 30 to 40 is usual now.
- The cold rinseThis is the hinge. Running cold water through the drained rice strips the surface starch and stops the cooking; skip it and the grains clump. It also cools the rice completely, which is why the recipe then reheats it.
- Double boilerThe covered top of a double boiler over simmering water is simply a gentle steamer. A heatproof bowl over a pan of water, covered, or a low oven in a covered dish, does the same. Ten to fifteen minutes undisturbed is enough.
- SaltTwo teaspoons in six cups of water is a firm seasoning, and most of it drains away with the water. It is not excessive by modern taste, but reduce it if you plan to keep the cooking liquid for soup.
- ServingCream or fruit sauce suggests breakfast or a simple dessert rather than a savoury accompaniment, though the book itself specifies no course. The same rice served plain works beside a savoury dish.
Good Food and How to Prepare It belongs to the wave of American health-reform cookery around the turn of the twentieth century, and the anxiety in this entry is characteristic: the book calls its own method "wasteful" and urges saving the cooking water for soup, because the nutrients dissolved out of the grain were understood to be a real loss. Concern about the nutritional cost of milling was in the air in the same decades -- the link between polished rice and beriberi was being established in this period -- though that is a separate question from what leaches out into boiling water. The note that "natural brown rice" needs longer cooking is worth pausing on: brown rice appears to have been a minority preference at the time, associated with reform and vegetarian cooks rather than sold as a mainstream staple. The technique itself, boiling in abundant water and rinsing, is a common nineteenth-century English and American answer to the problem of separate grains, and it stands in contrast to the absorption and pilaf methods that later cookbooks favoured.