Rice Milk
2 tablespoons of rice 1 pint scalded milk 1 saltspoon salt Soak the rice several hours, strain, and add the scalded milk and salt to the rice. Stir well, and cook slowly for one hour. Rub through a fine sieve, and dilute with more milk. Serve very cold. If preferred flavor with a half teaspoon of vanilla extract.
A thin, cold rice-and-milk drink of the invalid-cookery tradition — closer to a strained gruel than to the nut milks the name suggests today. It is simple, but it scorches easily and needs more seasoning than the original admits.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. That is the whole seasoning for a pint, and it is worth tasting at the end rather than trusting the measure.
- Scalded milkScalding means heating to about 180F, until a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge and the surface films over — not a rolling boil. In the period it also served to kill off souring bacteria in unpasteurised milk; today it mainly hastens the rice's softening.
- Rice and soakingUse ordinary white rice, long or medium grain; the book's 2 tablespoons is a scant ounce. Soaking several hours (or overnight in the refrigerator) lets it break down in the hour of cooking. "Strain" here simply means drain off the soaking water.
- The hinge: slow, indirect heatMilk and starch over direct heat for an hour will catch and taste burnt, and that flavour cannot be sieved out. Cook it in a double boiler, or in the heaviest pan you own over the lowest flame with frequent stirring.
- SievingRubbing through a fine sieve with the back of a ladle is what gives the drink its body; the grains break down into the milk rather than being discarded. A blender does much the same job faster, with a sieve afterwards to catch anything left whole.
- DilutingNo quantity is given because the drink thickens as it cools. Add cold milk until it pours freely from a spoon, and check the salt again after chilling, since cold dulls it.
- YieldRoughly a pint and a half once diluted, depending on how much milk you add: two generous glasses, or three small ones. Keep it covered and cold, and expect to thin and stir it again before serving.
Rice milk of this kind belongs to the old category of invalid and nursery cookery, where boiled cereals strained into milk — rice water, barley water, gruel, arrowroot — were fed to the sick, the very young and the toothless as something nourishing that required no chewing. Its appearance in the beverage chapter of a meatless cookbook reflects the era's understanding of nutrition: with meat removed from the table, whether for reasons of health, principle, or the wartime conservation campaigns often credited with driving a wave of such books in the 1910s, milk and cereal were the substitutes reached for first. The vanilla softens the sickroom preparation into something closer to a drink one might actually want.