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Steamed Rice
1 cup rice 2 cups boiling water 1 teaspoon salt Pick over and wash rice. Cook with salted water in double boiler 30 minutes, or till soft, adding more water if it gets too dry.
A double-boiler method for rice, from an era when scorching a pan on an uneven gas or coal range was a real risk. It works, but it is slow, and the ratios assume a different rice than most cooks buy today.
- Why the double boilerSteam heat never exceeds 212F, so the rice cannot catch on the bottom. The trade-off is that the water never boils hard, which is why the time runs to 30 minutes rather than the 15 to 18 a direct-heat pot needs.
- Picking overThis means spreading the dry grain on a plate and removing grit, hulls and small stones. Modern packaged rice is cleaned and this step can be skipped.
- WashingRinsing until the water runs clear removes surface starch and gives separate grains. Skip it for American-grown long grain, which is often enriched with vitamins in a coating that rinses away.
- Water ratioTwo cups water to one cup rice is right for long-grain white. Brown rice needs roughly 2 1/2 cups water and much longer cooking -- at least 45 minutes by direct heat, and longer again in a double boiler; short-grain will come out softer and stickier at this ratio.
- Don't stirThe instruction to add more water is the only intervention wanted. Stirring rice as it cooks breaks the grains and releases starch, turning the pot gluey.
- Rest before servingOnce soft, take the top pan off the heat, cover, and let it stand five to ten minutes. The grains firm up and shed their surface moisture.
- YieldOne cup of raw rice gives about three cups cooked, which serves four as a side dish.
Steamed rice earned its place in menu books because rice was the cheap, shelf-stable starch of the American household pantry, positioned alongside potatoes and macaroni as a filler that stretched a small portion of meat. The double boiler was a fixture of turn-of-the-century and early twentieth-century kitchens for exactly this kind of job: gas ranges and coal stoves gave uneven, hard-to-throttle heat, and any dish that could scorch was pushed up into a water-jacketed pan where it could not. By the early 1900s much American rice came from the Gulf states, Louisiana and Texas having largely displaced the older Carolina and Georgia tidewater plantations. The recipe's plainness suits a building block: steamed rice of this kind could reappear under curry, in a croquette, or sweetened with milk as a pudding.