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Rice Water No. 2
4 tablespoons rice 1 tablespoon raisins 1 1/2 pints boiling water Wash the rice carefully, put it into a saucepan with the water and stoned raisins and boil gently for one hour. Strain and serve cold. Sugar or salt may be added.
A sickroom drink rather than a refreshment, and it behaves like one: the point is the starch that leaches out of the grain, not the rice itself. A few notes before you set the pan on.
- The measurements1 1/2 pints is 3 cups (about 700 ml) in US measure; if you are working from a British edition, an imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so 1 1/2 pints is closer to 850 ml. Four tablespoons of rice is roughly 50 g.
- "Stoned raisins"Stoned means pitted. Muscatels and other large table raisins were commonly sold with seeds in them a century ago; modern supermarket raisins and sultanas are already seedless, so this step disappears.
- Keep it at a bare simmerAn hour of anything more than a lazy bubble can boil away a good deal of the liquid and scorch the starch on the bottom of the pan. Use a heavy saucepan, a lid set slightly ajar, and top up with boiling water if the level drops badly.
- Rice type mattersA short or medium grain white rice gives the cloudy, faintly thickened liquid this is after. Parboiled or converted rice releases much less starch and will produce something close to plain water.
- Strain properlyPour through a fine sieve and press the grains lightly with the back of a spoon to get the starchy liquid out, but do not force the pulp through unless you want it thick. Discard the spent rice and raisins.
- SeasoningThe recipe leaves the choice open. Start with a pinch of salt or a little sugar and taste, since the drink is meant to be mild.
- Yield and keepingYou will end up with rather less than you started with, after evaporation and straining. It thickens and can sour as it stands, so refrigerate and use within a day.
Rice water belongs to the long tradition of invalid cookery, the branch of household writing that supplied thin, bland, easily swallowed nourishment for the sick, the convalescent and the very young. Barley water, toast water, gruel and rice water all sit in the same family, and Victorian and Edwardian cookbooks print them among the beverages as a matter of course. The reasoning was partly nutritional and partly practical: boiled and strained, the drink carried a little starch and, crucially, water that had been boiled long enough to be trusted at a time when supplies often were not. The raisins here are the only concession to flavour, sweetening the liquid faintly as they soften. That a title like Meatless Cookery should include it reflects the era's interest in light, non-flesh diets for the unwell, an idea often traced to the sanitarium and vegetarian movements that shaped a good deal of early twentieth-century food writing.