Home › Rice, Hominy, Cereals, Etc. › Fried Rice
Fried Rice
Pick over and wash ½ cupful of rice, put in a double boiler with 1 pint of milk and ½ of a teaspoonful of salt. Stir once or twice as the rice begins to swell and cook slowly until all the liquid is absorbed. Turn into a buttered dish or bowl and set away until cold. Cut in half-inch slices, dust with flour and fry in butter or sweet drippings. Left-over rice may also be used in this way.
This is not the stir-fried dish the name now suggests: it is a milk-cooked rice pudding, chilled until sliceable, then fried like cornmeal mush. A few notes make it behave.
- The hinge: it must be cold and firmThe slices hold together only because the starch sets as the rice cools. The recipe says merely "set away until cold"; give it several hours, in a loaf pan or straight-sided bowl so you get slices of even thickness.
- Rice choiceA short or medium grain rice gives the sticky, sliceable set this depends on. Long-grain and converted rice stay too loose and the slices crumble in the pan.
- Ratio and vesselHalf a cup of rice to a pint (2 cups) of milk is a 1:4 ratio, generous but suited to a double boiler, where little liquid is lost to evaporation. In a regular saucepan over direct heat you will need to watch for scorching and may finish with less liquid absorbed.
- "Cook slowly until absorbed"Expect 45 minutes to an hour in a double boiler. It is done when a spoon drawn through leaves a track that closes slowly.
- Sweet drippingsThis means clean, mild rendered fat — bacon or beef drippings that have not picked up strong flavours — as opposed to rancid or heavily seasoned fat. Butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil to raise the smoke point, is the simplest substitute.
- FryingMedium heat, a well-flavoured skillet, and no crowding. Three to four minutes a side for a proper crust; moving the slices early tears them.
- Yield and servingRoughly two servings, depending on the depth of the dish it sets in. Fried grain slices of this kind were often eaten with syrup, molasses or jam at breakfast, or alongside meat in place of potatoes, though this recipe gives no serving suggestion.
Slicing and frying a cold cooked grain is a long-standing economy in the American kitchen — the same procedure that produces fried cornmeal mush and fried hominy. The logic is that a pot of porridge cooked in the evening becomes a fried dish the next morning at almost no extra cost, which is why the recipe closes by pointing out that leftover rice works as well as a batch cooked on purpose. Here the name means only that rice has been fried; the milk and salt place it in the porridge tradition rather than the wok.