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Rice as a Vegetable (Wash one cup of rice sprinkle)
Wash one cup of rice, sprinkle it carefully in a large kettle of boiling water. Cover and boil rapidly without stirring for twenty minutes. Drain, throw into a bowl of cold water to blanch ten minutes. Drain again in a colander, then stand the colander over a kettle of boiling water. Let it steam ten minutes. Stand at the oven door a few minutes to dry. Sprinkle with salt and serve.
Each grain should be swollen two or three times its original size and no two grains should stick together. Serve with fricassee of veal, or of chicken, or with boiled mutton. Where rice is served as a vegetable, do not serve potatoes in any form at the same time.
This is the boil-drain-steam method, treating rice like pasta rather than measuring water to the grain. It works, but the timings assume a coarser, older milled rice than what is sold now.
- The hinge: no stirringStirring is what breaks grains and releases the surface starch that makes them cling. Sprinkle the rice into water already at a rolling boil and leave it entirely alone until you drain it.
- Twenty minutes is too long nowModern long-grain white rice boiled loose in abundant water is tender in about 12 to 15 minutes, and 20 will give you split, mushy grains. Bite one at 12 minutes and drain when the centre has just lost its chalkiness; the steaming stage finishes the cooking.
- "Kettle" means a large potIn this period a kettle is any big cooking pot, not a spouted tea kettle. Use at least 3 to 4 quarts of water for one cup of rice so the grains circulate freely.
- The cold-water blanchPlunging the drained rice into cold water rinses off free starch and stops the cooking. Ten minutes is longer than needed and will cool the rice through; a brief rinse under cold running water does the same job, and the steaming stage reheats it.
- Steaming over the potSet the colander over simmering water so the base sits clear of the surface, and cover it loosely with a cloth or lid. Ten minutes is right, and the grains will swell and separate.
- "Stand at the oven door"On a coal range the open oven door gave a gentle current of dry heat. A low oven at 200F for five minutes, rice spread in a shallow pan, does the same; so does a minute uncovered over very low heat.
- SaltThe original salts only at the end. Salting the boiling water instead, about a tablespoon to 4 quarts, seasons the grain through rather than just its surface.
- YieldOne cup of raw rice gives roughly 3 cups cooked, enough for four as a side dish.
Turn-of-the-century American cookery books treated rice as a vegetable rather than a grain course, which is why the writer forbids serving it with potatoes at one meal: two starches on the same plate was considered a fault of menu-planning, not of taste. The ideal described here, every grain swollen and separate, was the standard by which cooks of the period judged rice. The boil-and-drain technique was common in nineteenth-century English and American kitchens.