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Boiled Rice (Cup rice qts boiling water)
1 cup rice 2 qts. boiling water 1 tablespoon salt Wash the rice thoroughly in several changes of water; cook in rapidly boiling salted water for 30 minutes, or until soft, which is determined by tasting the kernels. Drain in a strainer and pour boiling water over it. Shake slightly and let it stand in a warm place until ready to serve. Serves 6.
This is the old "pasta method" for rice: a large volume of salted water, drained and rinsed, giving separate grains rather than a moist absorbed-water pilaf. The one thing to change is the time.
- Thirty minutes is too longModern milled long-grain white rice cooks through in 12 to 18 minutes at a rolling boil. Thirty minutes will leave you with split, waterlogged grains. Keep the instruction that matters -- test a kernel by biting it -- and drain as soon as it is tender with no chalky centre.
- Which riceThe recipe does not say which rice; long-grain white is the likely intent. Brown rice does need 35 to 45 minutes by this method; parboiled (converted) rice about 20.
- WashingRinsing in several changes of water until it runs nearly clear removes loose surface starch and keeps the grains from clumping. If your rice is labelled enriched, rinsing washes off some of the added vitamins -- a fair trade for texture, but worth knowing.
- The saltA tablespoon in 2 quarts is about right for water that is drained away; very little of it stays with the rice. It is not the same as a tablespoon of salt in a dish you eat.
- The boiling-water rinsePouring boiling water through the drained rice in the strainer rinses off remaining starch without chilling the grains. Cold water would do the same job but leave you reheating.
- Holding it warm"A warm place" would have been somewhere like the back of the range. Set the strainer over the empty hot pot and cover loosely with a folded towel rather than a tight lid, so the steam escapes instead of turning the grains to paste.
- YieldOne cup of raw rice gives roughly 3 cups cooked, which is six modest side-dish servings as the book intends -- generous only if the rice is a bed for a stew or curry.
Boiling rice loose in a great deal of salted water, then draining and drying it, is the older English and American method, and it appears in household manuals well before absorption cooking became standard advice in the United States. It may also have suited the equipment: a coal or wood range gave an uneven, hard-to-lower heat, so a big pot at a full boil was arguably easier to manage than a low, steady simmer, and the cook could test and drain whenever the grains were ready rather than trusting a fixed time.