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Rice Atole
Atole de Arroz Cook 1 cup rice without salt in boiling water until soft. Press through a sieve. Add 1 quart of hot, not boiling, milk to the rice mush. Put in a double boiler to cook until rice and milk blend. Serve hot, like chocolate, with a dash of cinnamon or nutmeg or vanilla. Each cup may be topped with whipped cream if desired, but that wouldn't be exactly Mexican, for they put their hot drinks, especially chocolate, in a tall narrow pot with a hole in the cover to accommodate the handle of a beater which is twirled so fast between the palms that the drink froths up as thick as whipped cream itself.
And here's a little story a Mexican farmer told us to illustrate the homely attributes of atole which is both the drink and the food of the people: A neighbor's son went away to school for two years in the United States and then returned to the home hacienda with much grandeur. The first night at home he sat down to supper with all the family. "¿Que es este, mama [What's this]?" he asked, picking up his bowl and turning it around and around. "Atole-atole," absent-mindedly answered his mother. "¿Que es atole, mama [And what's atole]?" Then his mother looked at him, watching him critically while he kept turning the bowl rhythmically in his hands. "¿Come se te olvida el atole, pero no se te olvida el movimiento [How is it that you have forgotten the atole but haven't forgotten the movement]?" she asked him sarcastically.
A rice-thickened drinking atole, thin enough to sip from a cup rather than eat with a spoon. The one thing to watch is the milk: it must stay below a simmer, or the starch-and-milk mixture will scorch on the bottom and catch.
- Cook the rice soft, then someUse about 3 cups water to 1 cup long-grain white rice and simmer well past the usual 18 minutes — 30 to 35 minutes, adding water as needed, until the grains collapse. Sieving is much easier from genuinely overcooked rice; a blender or immersion blender does the same job in seconds and gives a smoother result.
- "Hot, not boiling" milkBring the quart of milk to roughly 160–170F, steaming with small bubbles at the edge. Adding boiling milk to hot starch paste invites scorching and a skin on top; the double boiler in the original is doing the same protective work.
- The double boilerTwenty to thirty minutes over simmering water, stirred occasionally, is enough for the rice and milk to lose their separateness. A heavy saucepan over low heat works if you stir it and accept that you must not walk away.
- No sweetener is specifiedAtole is usually drunk sweetened, so sugar or piloncillo may have been taken for granted at table, though this recipe says nothing about it. If you want it sweet, 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar, or a piece of piloncillo dissolved in the milk, plus a pinch of salt — the rice here is cooked unsalted, so the seasoning has to come back in somewhere.
- ConsistencyIt should coat a spoon lightly and still pour. If it thickens too far on standing, thin with more hot milk; rice starch keeps setting up as it cools.
- The molinilloThe "tall narrow pot" is a chocolatera and the beater is a molinillo, a turned wooden whisk spun between the palms. A hand blender or a jar shaken hard will froth the drink adequately; the molinillo is pleasant but not required.
- YieldA quart of milk plus the purée from a cup of rice makes appreciably more than the quart you started with. Serve in cups or mugs, not bowls, unless you thicken it further.