Rice Soup
Soak rice, boil beef, take stock and cook rice in it and thicken with egg same as bean soup.
A shorthand entry of the kind common in club and church cookbooks, where the writer assumed the reader already knew the house method for beef stock and for egg-thickened soup. The quantities are entirely absent, so the proportions below are reconstruction, not conversion.
- The hinge: the egg must not boilBeat the egg, slacken it with a ladleful of hot stock while whisking, then stir the mixture back into the pot off the heat or over the barest flame. Above roughly 180F the egg sets into shreds and the soup curdles instead of thickening.
- Proportions, since none are givenFor 2 quarts of beef stock, figure 1/2 to 2/3 cup of raw rice and 1 to 2 eggs. That yields a soup thickened to the consistency of thin cream and serves six.
- Soaking the riceRice of the period often needed washing and picking over, and many household books direct it. Modern packaged long-grain rice does not need it; a rinse to shed loose starch is enough, and the cooking time is roughly 18 minutes in simmering stock.
- "Boil beef, take stock"Probably a cheap cut such as shin, brisket or short rib simmered for hours in water, the meat then eaten separately as boiled beef. Something like three to four pounds of bony beef in 4 quarts of water, simmered uncovered 3 hours and strained, will give a stock of the right body.
- SeasoningThe original names no salt, pepper or aromatics because the stockpot was expected to carry them. Season the finished soup after the egg goes in, since reducing the stock earlier concentrates the salt.
- It does not reheat wellOnce thickened, the soup will separate if brought back to a boil, and the rice keeps swelling and drinking the stock. Make it to be eaten, and thin leftovers with fresh stock over low heat.
Rice soup belongs to the thrift end of the nineteenth-century American kitchen: the beef was the dinner, the broth became the next meal, and a handful of rice and an egg turned it into something that could be set before company. Recipes this compressed are common enough in subscription cookbooks like Reliable Recipes, compiled from contributors who wrote down only what they thought was distinctive and left the rest to cross-reference " here" a page the reader was expected to have already read. Thickening broth with beaten egg is far older than the book and turns up across Europe and the Near East, from Italian stracciatella to the avgolemono soups of the eastern Mediterranean. Rice itself was cheap and shelf-stable, grown in quantity in the Carolinas and later Louisiana, which is why it appears so freely in household books of the period as a stretcher for meat.