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Rice Water
1238. Is used in diarrhea as the only drink which will not increase the mischief. It is made by boiling a spoonful of washed Carolina rice in a pint of water for two or three hours, reducing this with more water until it is thin enough to suit the palate. A little lemon-peel may be added towards the last to give flavour; and it should be sweetened to the taste. It makes a very pleasant drink. Nutmeg is
An invalid's drink from the sick-room chapter, and one of the few nineteenth-century remedies that still makes sense: starchy rice water is close to the rice-based oral rehydration solutions used today. The method is sound but the timings are longer than any modern hob needs.
- Carolina riceA long-grain white rice, once the dominant American export type. Any long-grain white rice works; avoid brown rice, whose bran adds fibre that defeats the purpose here, and avoid risotto rices, which give a cloudier, gluier liquid.
- QuantitiesA spoonful here is most likely a tablespoon, roughly 12-15 g of rice. The pint may be an imperial pint (20 fl oz / 570 ml) or a US pint (16 fl oz / 473 ml), depending on the book's origin. Either way the result is deliberately thin.
- Two or three hoursThat length suits a hearth or a slow range. Covered, on a low burner with the water topped up, forty-five minutes to an hour will usually give much the same starchy liquid. The rice should be collapsing; strain it out and keep the water.
- Topping upThe instruction to reduce with more water means dilute, not concentrate. Add water as it evaporates and again at the end until the drink pours as freely as thin milk.
- Lemon peelAdd pared zest only, no pith, in the last ten minutes. Longer steeping turns it bitter, and if the drink is genuinely for an unsettled stomach, restraint with acid and sugar is sensible.
- KeepingStarchy liquids sour quickly. Make what will be drunk within a day, cool it fast, and refrigerate; it thickens as it chills and can be let down with a little water.
- YieldAbout a pint of finished drink, enough for two or three glasses.
Rice water belongs to the long tradition of invalid cookery, a section many nineteenth-century household manuals carried, at a time when nursing the sick happened at home and the cook was expected to supply it. The choice of Carolina rice is a marker of the period: rice grown in the South Carolina and Georgia lowcountry by enslaved labour was a leading export to Britain, particularly in the eighteenth century, and the name stayed attached to long-grain white rice long after the trade itself declined. The reasoning behind the drink was empirical rather than scientific, but it has aged unusually well: dissolved rice starch supplies both fluid and easily absorbed carbohydrate, and rice-based rehydration drinks have been used in the treatment of acute diarrhoea. Barley water, toast water and thin gruel appear alongside it in similar chapters, all versions of the same idea that a starchy, near-flavourless liquid is what a weak stomach will tolerate.