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Steamed Rice
2½ cups boiling water 1 teaspoon salt Place rice in earthen dish, add salt and boiling water, and steam two to three hours. Cooked in this way, every grain should be separate.
This is rice cooked by steam over water rather than boiled in it — a gentler method that was standard in American kitchens before quick-cooking milled rice became the norm. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- What "steam" means hereThe earthen dish holding rice and water goes inside a covered steamer or over a kettle of boiling water — the rice is never in direct contact with the flame. A double boiler with a tight lid does the same job, as does a covered heatproof bowl set on a rack in a large pot with a couple of inches of simmering water beneath it.
- The proportionThe rice quantity is missing from the text as it stands. A cup of raw rice would suit the 2½ cups of water given here, but the original figure cannot be recovered from this page.
- Two to three hours is not a misprintSteam heat tops out at about 212F and the water is absorbed slowly, so long timings were normal in period recipes. Modern milled rice will likely be tender well before three hours by this method; start checking at around the hour mark and add time only if the grains are still chalky at the centre.
- Don't stirThe claim that every grain stays separate depends largely on leaving the dish alone. Stirring works surface starch loose and tends toward a creamier, risotto-like mass.
- Rinse firstOlder rice came to the cook dusty and was routinely washed. Rinsing modern rice until the water runs nearly clear still helps the grains separate, though it is optional with enriched rice, where rinsing removes some of the added vitamins.
- The earthen dishAny heatproof bowl or glass dish that fits your steamer will do in its place; the recipe gives no reason for the choice of earthenware. Keep the dish covered so condensation from the steamer does not drip in and change the water ratio.
- YieldA cup of raw rice in this proportion gives about 3 cups cooked — four modest side servings.
Steaming was often recommended for rice in American cookery books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one method among several, and was set against boiling in an open pot of abundant water, which was faulted for washing away flavour and leaving the grains broken and gluey. Cooking teachers of the Boston school tradition returned repeatedly to the ideal of the separate grain, and steaming — slow, unattended, forgiving — was among the methods commended for producing it. Lowney's, a chocolate company, issued its cook book as a general household volume with its own products worked into the sweet chapters, so the vegetable section reads as straightforward domestic-science instruction of the day.