SOYER'S Recipe
INGREDIENTS for rice for large curry.- lb. of the best Carolina rice, 2 quarts of water, 1½ oz. of butter, a little salt. AVERAGE COST, 6d.
Wash the rice well in two waters; make 2 quarts of water boiling, and throw the rice into it; boil it until three-parts done, then drain it on a sieve. Butter the bottom and sides of a stewpan, put in the rice, place the lid on tightly, and set it by the side of the fire until the rice is perfectly tender, occasionally shaking the pan to prevent its sticking. Prepared thus, every grain should be separate and white. Either dish it separately, or place it round the curry as a border.
TIME.-15 to 25 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A two-stage method — parboil in abundant water, then finish covered in a buttered pan — that still gives the separate, dry grains the recipe promises. A few points of translation before you start.
- The missing quantityThe rice weight has dropped out of the text: it reads only "lb. of the best Carolina rice". Given 2 quarts (about 2.3 litres) of boiling water, anything from ½ to 1 lb is plausible, and the ratio is deliberately generous because the rice is drained rather than absorbed. Work by the water, not the rice.
- Carolina riceA long-grain white rice, once the dominant American export variety and used in Victorian Britain as a byword for good table rice. Any decent long-grain, including basmati, does the same job; short-grain and risotto rices will not stay separate.
- "Three-parts done"Boil until a grain still has a firm, slightly chalky centre — roughly 6 to 8 minutes for modern long-grain. This is the hinge of the method: rice drained too late will collapse into paste in the covered stage.
- "By the side of the fire"This means low, indirect, all-round heat, not a burner set low. Use the lowest gas or electric setting with a heat diffuser, or put the covered pan in a 300F oven for 10 to 15 minutes.
- Washing"Two waters" is two changes of cold water, to rinse off loose surface starch. Rinse until the water runs nearly clear; it takes more than two changes with most rice sold today.
- TimingThe stated 15 to 25 minutes most likely covers both stages together: something like 7 minutes boiling and 10 to 15 minutes steaming.
- Cost and yield"Average cost 6d." is Victorian retail pricing and tells you only that this was the cheap part of the meal. If you take the missing weight as around ¾ lb of dry rice, the pan would serve six to eight as an accompaniment to curry.
The name attached here is Alexis Soyer (1809–1858), the French-born chef of the Reform Club in London, who became the most famous cook in Britain through his cheap-cookery writing, his soup kitchens during the Irish famine, and his reorganisation of army cooking in the Crimea. Recipes credited to him circulated widely in nineteenth-century English household books, and Beeton's compilation carries several. The dish itself reflects the place curry had taken in the middle-class English repertoire by the mid-Victorian period: rice was treated as a European vegetable garnish, boiled hard, drained, then dried out in a buttered pan and moulded as a border round the dish — a presentation that owes more to European table service than to South Asian custom, though boiling and draining rice is itself long-standing practice in much of South Asia, particularly the south. Carolina rice, named for the plantations of the American South, was the standard good-quality long grain in British shops until Burmese and Indian imports displaced it later in the century.