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Rice, Baked
Wash a cup of rice, place it in a baking-dish . with a quart of water and a teaspoon of salt, and bake very slowly from one and one-half hour to nearly two hours. Serve in the same dish.
A plain oven-cooked rice with an unusually generous ratio of water to grain, which the long slow bake is meant to drive off. It works, but a few details need translating.
- "Very slowly" means 275-300F"Very slowly" -- probably a slow oven, in the region of 275-300F by most modern equivalences, though the book gives no temperature. At that heat the water is absorbed and evaporated rather than boiled, over the hour and a half to nearly two hours the recipe allows.
- The 4:1 ratio is deliberateThe 4:1 ratio -- A quart of water to one cup of rice is roughly twice what a modern absorption method uses. The recipe does not say whether the dish is covered; the excess would most easily be lost to evaporation from an uncovered dish over a long bake.
- Washing still matters hereThe instruction to wash is not just about dirt in the sack. Rinsing off surface starch is what stops a slow-baked rice from setting into a single mass.
- Baking-dishThe recipe specifies nothing beyond "a baking-dish." A wide, shallow dish will give more surface area for the extra water to evaporate than a deep, narrow one.
- Do not stirStirring -- The recipe says nothing about stirring, and an undisturbed oven bake will not break the grains. Test with a fork toward the end of the stated time.
- YieldOne cup of raw rice gives about three cups cooked, enough for four as a side dish.
Baked rice belongs to a period when the kitchen range was already hot for hours at a time and oven space cost nothing, so starches that a modern cook boils on a burner were often set in the oven and left. The Butterick book was published by the pattern company as part of a broader domestic library aimed at middle-class households running their own kitchens. Rice was cheap and widely available in American cities by 1900, by which date the Gulf crop -- Louisiana and Texas -- had largely displaced the declining Carolina industry, and cookbooks of the era treat rice as a vegetable and a starch interchangeably. The direction to serve in the same dish reflects both economy of washing-up and the assumption that a plain baking-dish was fit to appear on the table.