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Rice Milk
Wash and soak for several hours two tablesspoonfuls of rice. Strain and cover with one pint of scalded milk, and cook for an hour in a double boiler. Add one saltspoonful of salt. When thoroughly cooked rub through a fine sieve and add more milk. Serve cold. A half teaspoonful of vanilla may be added.
A thin, strained rice gruel from the invalid-cookery section, meant to be nourishing and easy to swallow. The measures are small and two of the terms have fallen out of use.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. That is the right amount for a pint of liquid; the salt is there to keep the milk from tasting flat, not to season it.
- Scalded milkHeat to about 180F, until it steams and a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge, then stop. Scalding was a safety step in the days of raw milk; it is also often said to deactivate an enzyme that interferes with starch thickening, though that explanation is repeated more often than it is demonstrated. With pasteurised milk it is optional, though starting with hot milk does shorten the cooking.
- Which riceUse a starchy white short- or medium-grain rice. Long-grain converted rice and brown rice will not break down enough to give the smooth, slightly thickened liquid the recipe wants.
- The double boiler is the pointMilk and rice scorch readily over direct heat, and scorched milk ruins the whole pint. Keep the water at a bare simmer and stir now and then; the full hour is genuinely needed for the grains to collapse.
- SievingRub through a fine sieve with the back of a ladle rather than blending. A blender aerates the starch and can turn it gluey; the sieve gives the thin, silky texture intended.
- "Add more milk"No quantity is given because the target is a consistency, not a volume. Thin with cold milk until it pours like heavy cream, and expect to add more after chilling, since it thickens as it cools.
- Yield and keepingRoughly two cups or a little more, depending on how much milk is added at the end; two to three small servings. Since it is served cold and made from milk, chill it promptly, keep it covered in the refrigerator, and use it within a day.
- FlavouringAdd the half teaspoon of vanilla off the heat, once the mixture has cooled. Sugar or a strip of lemon peel cooked with the rice appears in some related recipes and would not offend the original.
Rice milk belongs to the once-substantial genre of invalid cookery: bland, strained, spoon-or-cup foods prepared for the sick, the convalescent and the very young at a time when much nursing happened at home. Recipes of this kind fill a chapter in many general American household manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sitting alongside barley water, beef tea, gruel and albumenised milk. The logic behind them was that cereal starch cooked to the point of collapse and then strained left little for a weakened digestion to work on, an idea that predates any modern understanding of how starch is actually digested. The prolonged double-boiler cooking may also have had a practical safety dimension in an era before universal pasteurisation, when milk was a recognised route for tuberculosis and typhoid, and scalded milk is called for frequently in books of this kind.