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Plain Steamed Rice
1/2 cup rice 1 1/2 cups boiling water 1/2 teaspoon salt Wash the rice as directed above. Place the ingredients in a double boiler. The water in the outer cup should be boiling. Cook one hour. Serve with cream or fruit sauce.
A double-boiler method from the era when rice was treated as a breakfast cereal rather than a savoury side. The long, gentle cook is deliberate: the grains swell whole without stirring or scorching.
- The double boiler is the pointThe rice sits in the upper pan, over water kept at a rolling boil in the lower one, so it never touches direct heat. If you substitute a heavy saucepan on a low burner, you will need to check for sticking well before the hour is up.
- What kind of riceAlmost certainly plain milled white rice rather than converted, parboiled or basmati, none of which would have been meant here. Modern rice is milled cleaner, so the washing step called for above is largely optional now, though it still removes loose starch.
- The ratioThree parts water to one of rice is generous by modern standards, where two to one is usual. The extra allows for an hour of slow evaporation and gives a softer, slightly porridge-like grain, which is what was wanted here.
- An hour is not a misprintSteamed over water this way the rice absorbs slowly and is very unlikely to boil dry or scorch. If you want firm separate grains in twenty minutes, that is a different method and a different dish.
- "The outer cup"This means the lower pan of the double boiler. Keep it at a genuine boil and top it up with more boiling water if it runs low over the hour.
- Yield and servingHalf a cup of raw rice gives roughly a pint cooked, enough for two as a breakfast dish or four as a small side. Cream or a sweetened fruit sauce puts it firmly on the breakfast table; salt aside, it is otherwise unseasoned.
Rice cooked soft and served with cream, sugar or stewed fruit was a common American and British breakfast food through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, appearing alongside oatmeal, hominy and cracked wheat in the cereal sections of household manuals. The double boiler was a favoured vessel of the domestic-science movement for exactly this kind of cooking: it made scorching very difficult, required little watching, and suited the era's conviction that starches needed long cooking to be digestible. The instruction to wash the rice is generally taken to reflect the period's less thorough milling, when grains could arrive dusty with starch and sometimes with chaff or grit among them.