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Wild Rice Suggestions
We like steamed wild rice fixed by putting 3/4 cup in a covered dish with 2 cups boiling water. Let stand 20 minutes and repeat the process thrice, the last time stirring in. a teaspoon of salt. This takes an hour.
To prepare it quicker boil 1 cup wild rice in 6 cups water with 1 teaspoon salt, without stirring. Remove after 25 minutes of boiling, set in warm place to dry. In this case you sacrifice taste for speed, which may be the streamlined thing to do.
There's nothing better than wild rice for stuffing a wild duck that's fed on wild rice, or any other fowl for that matter. You can thicken soups with it, too, and mix with vegetables. When you use wild rice with wild fowl be sure to pour over it any gravy from the bird.
Steamed wild rice with canned milk or cream and sugar makes a good dessert and everybody goes for buttered wild rice if you've got time for it:
Two methods for the same grain: a long steep in repeated changes of boiling water, and a fast boil. The steeping method is worth the hour if you have it, and it is forgiving in camp where you cannot hold a low simmer.
- Know which wild rice you haveHand-parched lake rice, the kind this book assumes, is long, dark, unevenly sized and cooks faster than it looks. Cultivated paddy rice, the uniform black grain sold in most supermarkets, is harder and often needs 45-55 minutes of simmering rather than 25.
- Rinse firstWild rice carries chaff and grit, especially the hand-harvested sort. Rinse in a few changes of cold water and skim off anything that floats before either method.
- The steeping methodThree-quarters of a cup of rice to 2 cups boiling water, steeped 20 minutes with fresh boiling water each time, is a thermos-flask technique in a covered dish. The text says to 'repeat the process thrice' but also that the whole thing takes an hour, so three steeps in all appears to be meant. Preheat the dish and keep it out of a draught, or the later steeps will not be hot enough to do any work.
- Judge doneness by the grainCooked wild rice splits lengthwise and curls back on itself, showing the pale interior. Grains still closed and shiny are underdone regardless of the clock.
- Do not stir the boiled versionAgitation can break the split grains and leave the result gummy rather than separate; drain and let it steam dry in a warm place instead.
- Canned milkThis means unsweetened evaporated milk, which is thicker and slightly caramelised compared with fresh cream. Half-and-half is the closer substitute if you want the dessert without the tinned note.
- Stuffing a birdRice packed into a duck absorbs juices and heats slowly. Cook the stuffing to 165F at the centre of the cavity, or cook the rice separately and combine after roasting, which also keeps the grains distinct.
- YieldA cup of raw wild rice swells to roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups cooked, enough for four as a side dish or two if it is the body of the meal.
Wild rice is not rice at all but the seed of Zizania, an aquatic grass native to the lakes and slow rivers of the upper Great Lakes region and the Canadian shield, and long harvested by Ojibwe and Menominee people who poled through the stands and knocked the ripe grain into canoes. Camp cookbooks of the mid-twentieth century treat it as a sportsman's staple precisely because it grows where the ducks are, and the pairing of a rice-fed bird with its own feed is an old north-woods conceit rather than a chef's invention. The remark about sacrificing taste for speed being "the streamlined thing to do" places this squarely in an era when parching was still done over wood fires and cultivated paddy rice had not yet made the grain a year-round supermarket item.