Rice Water
1/4 cup rice 1 quart cold water The so-called "natural brown" rice, or rice from which the bran has not been removed, is best for this.
Wash the rice thoroughly by whipping it in hot water with a batter whip and turning off the water several times, then put the rice to cook in the cold water. Heat to boiling, and simmer slowly till the liquid is reduced to one pint. Strain off the broth, season with salt, and with cream if desired. Reheat and serve.
A thin rice broth of the sort once kept in every sickroom. The whole recipe hangs on the reduction: you cook until the quart of water has become a pint, roughly 45 minutes to an hour at a bare simmer.
- Reduce by half, not by clockIgnore any impulse to time this. Simmer uncovered, or with the lid ajar, until the liquid measures about a pint; a tight lid will keep the volume up and leave the broth watery.
- Quantities1/4 cup rice to 1 quart water reduces to a pint, so a little under two cups of strained broth once the grain has taken up its share; call it two small servings. The recipe does not specify a variety beyond "natural brown."
- "Natural brown" riceThis is simply brown rice, unpolished, which for most of the period was a specialty choice rather than the default. Any modern brown rice works; the bran is what the recipe is after.
- The washing stepWhipping the rice in hot water with a batter whip and changing the water several times is a thorough wash for dust and loose starch. Modern rice needs only two or three rinses in cool water, and brown rice barely needs that.
- Low heat throughoutBring to a boil once, then drop to the lowest simmer that still moves the surface. A hard boil breaks the grains down and pushes starch into the liquid, giving a gluey broth rather than a clear one.
- Don't discard the grainThe strained rice is fully cooked and perfectly good; it can go into a soup or a pudding rather than into the bin.
- SeasoningSalt to taste after straining, since the reduction concentrates whatever you add early. A tablespoon or two of cream per cup is enough to round it out without masking the rice.
Rice water belongs to the long tradition of "invalid cookery" — thin gruels, barley waters and beef teas that filled a chapter of many nineteenth-century household manuals, intended for the sick, the very young and the convalescent at a time when little else could be offered them. Rice and barley waters were valued for being bland and easy to keep down, and rice water in particular has a long history as a home remedy for digestive upset across South and East Asia as well as in Europe and America. The insistence here on unpolished brown rice, on the grounds that the bran carries much of the grain's value, was a minority view at the time and one broadly borne out since.