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Cream of Rice Soup No. 2
1 small cup of rice 3 cups milk 3 tablespoons butter 1 small onion Stalk celery 1 bay leaf Salt Pepper Scald the milk, add the well washed rice, and cook in double boiler thirty minutes, covered closely.
Melt the butter in saute pan, add the sliced onion, and cook until tender, taking care not to let it brown. Add the celery diced, and turn into the scalded milk; add the bay leaf, cover, and let stand on back of range fifteen minutes. Strain, season with salt and pepper, reheat, and serve.
A simple milk-and-rice soup from the meatless repertoire, built on a double boiler and gentle infusion rather than a roux. Two things need attention: the rice-to-milk ratio, and what "strain" is actually meant to accomplish.
- The hinge: don't scorch the milkMilk with rice in it will catch and scorch over direct heat, which is why the double boiler is specified. Keep the water below the insert at a bare simmer and the lid on, or the starch will settle and burn against the bottom.
- "A small cup of rice""small cup" is genuinely vague, and although standard cup measures were already in circulation, household cups still varied — read it as around 1/2 to 2/3 cup of raw long- or medium-grain rice. A full 8-oz cup against only 3 cups of milk will absorb nearly everything and give you porridge rather than soup.
- ScaldingBring the milk to about 180F, when it steams and a rim of bubbles forms at the edge, not to a rolling boil. Scalding was often recommended as a keeping-quality measure before milk was reliably pasteurised, and it may also help the rice soften evenly.
- "Back of range"A wood or coal range had a cool zone at the rear used for holding and steeping. The modern equivalent is the lowest burner setting, a warming drawer, or simply a covered pot off the heat for the full fifteen minutes.
- Strain, or sieveTaken literally, straining discards the rice and leaves a thin flavoured milk — thin for something called a cream soup. Press the solids through a fine sieve or blend the whole thing and then sieve out the celery strings and bay; that is what gives the body the name promises.
- ConsistencySieved rice thickens further as it cools and will set almost solid in the refrigerator. Have extra hot milk or a light vegetable stock at hand to loosen it back to a pouring consistency when you reheat.
- The onion"Cook until tender, taking care not to let it brown" is the whole point of sweating in butter — browning would push the soup toward onion soup and muddy the pale colour the dish depends on. Low heat, lid on, five to eight minutes.
- Seasoning and yieldAbout three to four cups finished, serving three or four as a first course. Milk-and-rice soups take considerably more salt than you expect; season at the very end, after reheating, and consider a scrape of nutmeg or a little white pepper rather than black, which speckles.
Cream soups of this kind — a starch cooked soft in milk, flavoured with an aromatic vegetable and then sieved — were a mainstay of the meatless soup course in American and English cookery from the late nineteenth century onward, when a Friday or Lenten table, a sickroom tray, and a vegetarian household all drew on the same handful of formulas. Rice was among the blandest of the thickeners, kinder to the digestion than flour by the dietary thinking of the day, and it appears again and again in invalid cookery for exactly that reason. The bay leaf and celery here do all the work: without meat stock, the flavour has to come from an infusion, which is why the pot is set aside to steep rather than boiled harder. The instruction to move it to the "back of the range" dates the recipe as clearly as any ingredient does — it assumes a solid-fuel stove with a permanent gradient of heat across its top, a piece of equipment that had largely vanished from new kitchens within a generation.