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Prepared Cereals
The recipes given on the packages for all prepared cereals may be followed, doubling the amount of time given. 1 cup rice Boiled Rice No. 2 2½ cups boiling water 1 teaspoon salt Salt water, add rice a few grains at a time, so as not to stop the boiling, boil rapidly one half hour. When grains are tender, drain in colander, and pour boiling water over rice to wash starch from grains. Serve immediately. 1 cup rice
Two things sit on this page: a blanket instruction about packaged cereals, and a stand-alone method for boiled rice. Both reflect a kitchen where grains arrived less refined than ours.
- The half hour is for the rice of 1907The half hour is for the rice of the period -- Modern milled long-grain white rice is tender in 12-15 minutes; boiled a full half hour it collapses into paste. Start testing grains at 12 minutes. Brown rice is the one that still wants 35-45 minutes.
- "Doubling the amount of time given"The instruction covers boxed breakfast grains of the period generally, such as rolled oats, cracked wheat and hominy grits. It should not be applied to anything sold in a box today, least of all quick oats or instant grains.
- This is the pasta method, not absorption2½ cups water to 1 cup rice looks like an absorption ratio but is not - the rice is boiled hard, then drained. If the pan threatens to run dry before the grains are tender, add more boiling water freely. Nothing here depends on the liquid being absorbed.
- Adding the grains slowlyScattering rice in a few grains at a time keeps the water at a rolling boil so the outsides seize rather than sit and gum together. Worth doing.
- The boiling-water rinsePouring boiling water through the drained rice washes off surface starch and gives separate grains. Use boiling, not cold, or the rice arrives at the table lukewarm.
- Yield1 cup of raw rice gives roughly 3 cups cooked, four modest side servings. The text ends with a stray "1 cup rice", most likely the opening ingredient line of the next recipe rather than a second measure for this one.
Rice sold in American groceries around 1900 was frequently coated - talc and glucose were used to polish and preserve the grain - and older cookbooks routinely called for washing rice before cooking and rinsing it after, habits that survive in recipes long after the coatings stopped. The pasta method here, boiling hard in abundant salted water and draining, was the standard English and American treatment; the absorption method most home cooks use now appears to have come into general American use later, though the timing is hard to pin down. The opening line about prepared cereals marks the moment squarely: by the time this book appeared, boxed and part-cooked breakfast grains were common enough that a cookbook could simply defer to the package.