Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Rice Porridge
Rice Porridge
Put one-half pound of rice into three quarts of boiling water and let it swell until it is quite a jelly, then add to it one-fourth pound of oatmeal mixed with water and stir it well in; add also one ounce of finely-chopped onion, pepper and salt to taste, and one-half ounce of bacon fat, lard or butter, and boil all together, stirring continually. If desired the quantity of oatmeal may be larger; it may even be the same as the rice.
A savoury gruel rather than a sweet breakfast cereal, and closer to a thin soup than to what most cooks now mean by porridge. The proportions are generous and the whole thing thickens far more than it looks like it will.
- Scale and yieldHalf a pound of rice (about 1 1/8 cups) in three quarts of water gives something on the order of 2 1/2 to 3 quarts of finished porridge once evaporation is allowed for, enough for perhaps 8 to 10 servings. Halve everything for a household batch.
- The hinge: stir once the oatmeal goes inRice starch plus oatmeal on a direct flame will catch and scorch quickly if it is left to settle. The instruction to stir continually is not decoration; use a heavy pan and a flat-edged wooden spoon that reaches the corners.
- Rice choiceUse a starchy medium- or short-grain rice, or plain long-grain, not parboiled or basmati. "Quite a jelly" means the grains have burst and the liquid has gone thick and cloudy, which will take a good while at a low simmer -- the recipe gives no time, so judge it by the texture.
- OatmealFour ounces (roughly 2/3 to 3/4 cup) of coarse or medium-cut oatmeal, meaning steel-cut or pinhead oats, not rolled flakes. Slaking it with water first, as directed, keeps it from clumping; rolled oats will dissolve into slime instead.
- The fatHalf an ounce is one tablespoon, which is very little for this volume. Bacon fat gives the dish most of what flavour it has; if you use butter, expect to want salt and a good deal of pepper.
- OnionOne ounce is only a few tablespoons chopped, a fraction of a small onion. It goes in with the oatmeal and boils with the rest, but it may still be noticeable in a porridge this thick, so soften it in the fat first if you want it to disappear into the whole.
- ServingServe very hot in bowls; it stiffens to a sliceable mass as it cools. Leftovers can be thinned with stock or water and reheated, or cut into squares and fried in the same fat.
Savoury rice-and-oatmeal gruels of this sort belong to the tradition of cheap bulk feeding rather than to restaurant cookery, and the language here — weights in half-pounds and ounces, water by the quart, the note that the oatmeal may be increased to stretch the dish further — reads like the plain economical cookery associated with institutional and charitable kitchens of the nineteenth century, though the recipe itself carries no such attribution. Oscar Tschirky's compilation, published in 1896, gathers a great many workaday preparations alongside the Waldorf's celebrated dishes. The word porridge is generally taken to be an alteration of pottage — what was boiled in a pot — rather than anything to do with breakfast oats, which is why a peppered, onioned, bacon-fatted rice dish sits comfortably under the name.