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Rice Soup with Vegetables
When boiling rice in a quantity of water, as many people prefer to do, do not throw the water away. Drain it into a saucepan, and add a few diced carrots, a bit of celery tops and green onion, a sprig of parsley, and any other tender greens at hand. Season with salt and a little white pepper.
Cover and simmer gently until the vegetables are done. More water may be added as needed, also a spoonful or two of cooked peas, or string-beans cut in thin strips. This makes a savory and nutritious dish. Another use for such water is to let simmer in it a cup of good breakfast hash with just enough vegetables added to give it flavor. 3
This is a thrift note rather than a fixed formula: the starchy water left from boiling rice becomes the base of a light vegetable soup. A few adjustments make it worth doing rather than merely frugal.
- The hinge: rinse or don'tThe whole idea depends on cooking rice in abundant water and keeping the liquid. Absorption cooking, common now, leaves nothing to drain, so plan the method before the meal, not after.
- What the water actually contributesRice water is mostly starch, with a little salt if you salted it. It gives body and a faintly sweet, milky cloudiness but almost no savour, so the seasoning has to come from elsewhere: a parmesan rind, a spoonful of miso, or a splash of stock will lift it considerably.
- QuantityThe recipe gives no measurements. As a rough guide, a pound of rice boiled in three quarts of water will leave somewhere between one and a half and two quarts of liquid once absorption and evaporation are accounted for, enough soup for about four; half the rice, a soup for two.
- Celery tops and green onionCelery leaves are bitter when overcooked; add them in the last five minutes rather than at the start. The green onion here means what a modern market calls scallions, tops included.
- Timing the vegetablesDiced carrots need 10 to 15 minutes at a bare simmer. The cooked peas or string beans mentioned at the end are already tender and want only a minute or two to heat through, otherwise they go grey and mealy.
- White pepperSpecified because it will not speck a pale soup. It is not simply black pepper in a different colour, though: the soaking and hulling that produce it leave a distinct earthy, slightly fermented note, so the substitution changes the flavour as well as the look.
- The hash variation"Breakfast hash" here means yesterday's cooked meat and potato hash. Simmering it in rice water makes a thick chowder-like soup, but reheated cooked meat should reach a full simmer and be eaten the same day rather than held on the stove.
- Keeping the waterRice water is starchy and mildly nutritious, which also means it sours quickly. Use it the day it is made or refrigerate it promptly; do not leave it standing at room temperature.
Cookbooks devoted entirely to leftovers were a small industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when household economy was treated as a moral discipline as much as a budget exercise, and the waste of anything nutritious was held to reflect on the cook. The instruction here rests on a belief common in the period that the goodness of a food passed into its cooking water, so that pot liquor from greens, potatoes or rice ought to be saved for soup; in the case of rice that goodness is largely starch, though the practice does capture some of the vitamins and minerals lost to boiling. Rice water has a much longer life outside the soup pot as well, being widely used as a drink for invalids and for children recovering from stomach illness, a use recorded in medical and domestic manuals on several continents. The casual list of ingredients here, with no measurements and the standing instruction to use "any other tender greens at hand," is characteristic of the genre: the point was not a dish to be reproduced exactly but a habit of mind.