Home › Vegetables › Rice Soup
Rice Soup
1 quart of milk, 1/2 a small onion, I bay-leaf, Salt and pepper to taste.
Put the milk in a double boiler, add the rice to it. Cook slowly thirty minutes. Keep the boiler covered or the milk evaporates, and you must have at least one quart when the rice is tender. Cut the onion into slices, put with the butter in the frying-pan, cook slowly until the onion is tender but not brown. Then add the celery to the onion and turn the whole into the farina boiler. Add the bay-leaf, cover, and let stand on the back part of the stove fifteen minutes. Then press the whole through a purée sieve, return to the boiler, season with salt and pepper and it is ready to serve.
If the milk evaporates during the cooking and the soup is too thick, add sufficient milk to make it the proper consistency.
A milk-based purée soup of the kind that filled the "cream soup" pages of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks. The printed ingredient list has been truncated — rice, butter and celery all appear in the method but not in the list — so quantities have to be inferred.
- The missing quantitiesFor 1 quart of milk, roughly 1/3 cup raw white rice, 1 tablespoon butter and 2 stalks of celery give the consistency the recipe describes. These are reasonable inferences, not the author's figures; the original list is incomplete.
- "Farina boiler"The same vessel as the double boiler mentioned earlier — a lidded inner pan set over simmering water, sold for cooking farina and other cereals. Any double boiler or a heatproof bowl over a pan of water works.
- Why the double boiler mattersThis is the hinge of the recipe. Milk with rice in it scorches and sticks over direct heat, and starch on a hot pan bottom will taint the whole quart. Indirect heat is not fussiness here.
- Keep it coveredThe recipe warns explicitly about evaporation: an uncovered quart of milk over thirty minutes loses enough water to leave the soup noticeably too thick. Measure at the end and top up with milk as directed.
- Rice timingThirty minutes suits long-grain white rice in milk, which tends to soften more slowly than in water. Brown rice will not break down in that time; parboiled rice holds its grain and purées poorly.
- "The back part of the stove"On a coal or wood range the area away from the firebox, often the rear of the top plate, was among the coolest — roughly the equivalent of the lowest burner setting or a covered pan off the heat. The fifteen minutes reads as a standing infusion for the bay leaf rather than further cooking.
- SievingA purée sieve was a conical or drum sieve worked with a wooden pestle. A food mill or a short blitz with an immersion blender followed by a pass through a fine strainer gives the same smooth result; over-blending rice can turn it gluey, so stop when it is smooth.
- YieldAbout a quart, which serves four as a first course. The recipe does not say to remove the bay leaf before sieving; lifting it out first will keep the soup paler.
Milk soups thickened with a grain and finished through a sieve were a staple of the American cooking-school tradition that produced books like this one — cheap, bland by design, and often recommended for invalids and children as much as for the dinner table. Double boilers were long-established, but purpose-made cereal or "farina" boilers were among the domestic wares widely marketed in the later nineteenth century on the promise that milk need never scorch again. Rice itself was inexpensive and, in the dietary thinking of the period, valued as an easily digested starch; celery and onion cooked gently in butter, then strained out, supply the whole of the seasoning apart from bay, salt and pepper. Soups of this type anticipate the cream-of-vegetable soups that were later canned.