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Spanish Rice
¾ cup rice
½ cup chopped green pepper
2 tablespoons fat or pimientos
Salt
5 cups water
2 onions
Pepper
2 cups tomatoes
Paprika
Fry the rice in the fat until brown, then add water and boil until soft. Drain. Sauté the onions in a little fat; mix with tomatoes and chopped peppers or pimientos, and add to the rice. Add seasoning , and place in a greased casserole. Bake for thirty minutes.
A pilaf-style rice baked rather than steamed, written for a cook who was expected to know her own oven and season by taste. The original gives no temperature and no salt quantity, so both need supplying.
- Brown the rice properlyFrying the rice in fat until it colours helps keep the grains separate through boiling and baking. Take it to a golden brown over medium heat, stirring, before any liquid goes in; pale rice tends to end up softer and stickier.
- Five cups of water is deliberateThis is the pasta method: the rice boils loose in abundant water and is then drained, rather than absorbing a measured amount. Long-grain white rice will be soft in about 15 minutes. Drain it well, and do not rinse away the toasted flavour.
- "Fat"In American home cooking of this period this would most often have meant lard or bacon drippings, with butter as the genteel option. Any neutral oil or butter works; bacon fat suits the dish.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe uses no oven term at all. Around 350F for the stated thirty minutes is a reasonable choice for a dish whose components are all already cooked; the bake mainly marries the flavours and drives off some tomato liquid.
- TomatoesThe recipe says only "2 cups tomatoes" and does not specify fresh or canned. Canned tomatoes with their juice are a workable reading, roughly a 15- to 16-ounce can, chopped. Fresh tomatoes can be reduced a little in the pan first if they seem watery.
- Peppers or pimientosThe recipe offers a choice: raw chopped green bell pepper, which stays sharp, or jarred pimientos, which are already roasted, sweet and soft. They are not interchangeable in flavour. Half a cup of either is about one medium pepper or one small jar, drained.
- SeasoningSalt, pepper and paprika are listed without amounts. Start with a teaspoon of salt, a half teaspoon of paprika and pepper to taste, and correct after mixing; drained rice absorbs salt poorly once cooked, so taste the tomato mixture before it goes in.
- Cover itUncovered at 350F for half an hour the surface rice can dry out. Cover the dish, and remove the lid for the last five or ten minutes if you want a browned surface.
- YieldNot stated; ¾ cup of raw rice with the vegetables makes about four side-dish servings, or two to three as a main. It reheats well with a splash of water.
"Spanish rice" in American cookbooks of this period rarely had much to do with Spain; the name attached itself to almost any rice cooked with tomato, onion and pepper, and it is often said to have travelled north through Mexican and Tejano kitchens before being absorbed into the general repertoire of cheap, filling one-dish suppers. Its appearance as a baked dish is telling: the 1920s saw a boom in baked composite dishes, generally attributed to more reliable gas ovens, the spread of flameproof and ovenproof ware in ordinary households, and a wartime and postwar interest in stretching small amounts of meat or none at all. Butterick, a pattern company publishing for the home sewer and housekeeper, was aiming squarely at that reader, and this recipe shows the house style: no meat, no precise seasoning, and the confident assumption that the cook already knew what a moderate oven felt like.