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Steamed or Creamed Rice
1 cup rice 1 cup water 1 1/2 cups milk 1/2 cup cream 1 teaspoon salt Wash the rice thoroughly, and cook in the boiling water. Boil five minutes, then set in the double boiler, and cook until the water is mostly absorbed. Heat the milk and cream in the double boiler, and add to the rice. Add salt, and finish cooking in the double boiler, which will require about one hour. If cream is not convenient, use an additional one-half cup of milk, and one tablespoon butter.
Do not stir except to lift gently once or twice with a fork.
A slow double-boiler rice pudding-adjacent side dish, closer to a savory risotto in texture than to fluffy steamed rice. The method is sound but the timing assumes an older, harder milled rice.
- The hinge: don't stirThe instruction to lift gently with a fork once or twice is the whole technique. Stirring drags starch out of the grains and turns the dish gluey rather than creamy-but-distinct.
- Which riceProbably written for ordinary white rice of the period, which is why the recipe begins by washing it: rice then was often dusty or surface-coated. Modern American rice needs no washing for cleanliness, though rinsing still removes surface starch and keeps grains separate. Instant rice will not survive an hour of cooking, and parboiled rice stays too firm and separate for the creamy result intended here.
- About that hourAn hour in a double boiler was unremarkable for the period. Modern rice may well be done sooner; start checking at 25 to 30 minutes after the milk goes in, and pull it when the grains are tender and the liquid is thickened but not dry.
- Total liquidThree cups of liquid to one cup of rice is a high ratio, deliberately so — the result should be soft and creamy, not dry and separate. If you want drier rice, hold back half a cup of the milk.
- Double boiler substituteA heatproof bowl over a saucepan of barely simmering water works, as does a heavy pot on the lowest burner setting with a diffuser. The point is that milk scorches on direct heat.
- CreamHalf a cup of early-twentieth-century 'cream' was probably nearer what we would call light cream than heavy cream, though the fat content of gravity-separated cream varied a good deal. Light cream or half-and-half is the nearest supermarket match; heavy cream will make it noticeably richer.
- YieldAbout four cups cooked, serving four as a side or the base of a meatless main course.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt for one cup of raw rice is on the assertive side by modern standards but appropriate here, since the milk and cream flatten flavor. Add half at the start and adjust at the end.
Meatless cookbooks proliferated in the English-speaking world in the 1910s, driven by vegetarian and health-reform movements with roots in the nineteenth century; later in the decade, wartime food conservation campaigns — from 1917-18 in the United States and later in the war in Britain — added their own pressure on households to spare meat for the front. That is why a plain dish of rice could stand as a main course rather than a side: enriched with milk, cream and butter, it would plausibly carry something like the protein and fat load that a cut of meat would otherwise supply, and sit at the center of the plate rather than beside something else. The double boiler was the standard tool for any milk-heavy dish in a coal- or gas-range kitchen, where direct heat was hard to hold low enough to keep milk from catching. Rice itself was cheap and shelf-stable, which made it a reliable answer to the period's constant question of what to serve instead.