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Boiled Rice
Wash one cup rice and drain. Fill a four-quart saucepan one half full of boiling salted water. Place on hottest part of range. When boiling rapidly, sprinkle in the rice slowly, not to stop the boiling. Cook until tender, adding more water if needed. Drain in a colander, and place in the open oven to dry.
Rice cooked in this way will have every grain separate.
This is the pasta method for rice: a large volume of boiling salted water, drained when tender. It works on any burner and forgives inattention, which is why it was standard before the absorption method took hold in American kitchens.
- The hingeAdd the rice slowly enough that the water never stops boiling. Dumping it in all at once drops the temperature, the grains sit and soften in still water, and the exterior starch turns to paste — the opposite of the separate grains promised at the end.
- "Hottest part of range"A wood or coal range had zones; you moved the pan rather than turning a dial. On a modern hob this simply means high heat, and keep it there for the whole cook.
- Water quantityHalf of a four-quart pan is about 2 quarts, which is generous for one cup of rice. Salt it as you would pasta water — roughly a tablespoon per 2 quarts — since most of it drains away.
- TimingThe recipe gives none because rice varied. Long-grain white rice takes 12 to 15 minutes by this method; start tasting at 10. Brown rice needs 30 minutes or more.
- WashingRice of this period was often dusty and sometimes coated with talc or glucose, so washing was necessary. Modern packaged rice needs only a quick rinse to remove loose surface starch, and pre-rinsed or enriched rice should not be washed at all, as it removes the added vitamins.
- "The open oven"The cooling oven of a range with its door ajar — perhaps 200 to 250F. Spread the drained rice in a shallow pan and give it 5 to 10 minutes uncovered. A dry pan over the lowest burner heat, lid off, does the same job.
- YieldOne cup of raw rice gives about 3 cups cooked, enough for four as a side dish.
Boiling rice in abundant water and draining it was the standard American and British treatment through the nineteenth century, in contrast to the absorption and steaming methods of Asian kitchens, where rice was the centre of the meal rather than a side dish. The insistence on washing reflects the era's milled rice, which was frequently coated or dusty; the drying in the open oven relies on a range that stayed warm for hours after the cooking was done.