Buttered Wild Rice

A camp method that trades active cooking time for a long unattended soak — sensible when your heat source is a fire and your pot is shared. It works at home too, with a few adjustments.

• The hinge: the soak does the cookingA day and a night in cold water swells the grains and may split some of them open, so the half hour in the double boiler is largely just heating through. Shorten the soak and you are likely to get hard, grassy kernels that thirty minutes of gentle steaming will not soften.
• Know which wild rice you haveHand-harvested, parched lake rice (long, slender, mottled brown-green) hydrates well on a cold soak. Machine-cultivated paddy rice, the uniformly dark kind in most supermarkets, is harder and will generally still want a spell of actual simmering after soaking.
• Food safety on the long soakA day and a night at camp temperatures is fine in cold weather; in a warm kitchen, soak in the refrigerator or change the water once or twice. Soaking grain left warm for 24 hours can sour.
• Water quantityFive cups to one cup of rice is soaking water, not cooking water — drain it all off. Wild rice absorbs three to four times its volume, so the surplus is simply insurance against the grain drinking the pot dry.
• The double boilerGentle indirect heat keeps the grains whole rather than bursting them into mush. Add a few spoonfuls of water to the drained rice before it goes over the steam, and cover the pot; the top of a double boiler alone will not generate enough steam from damp rice.
• Butter and seasoningHalf a cup of butter to one cup of dry rice is generous by modern standards; two to four tablespoons dresses it adequately. The recipe gives no salt at all — season the rice after draining.
• YieldOne cup of dry wild rice makes roughly three to three and a half cups cooked, enough for four as a side dish.