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Rice, Valencienne
Finely chop a sound green pepper with a medium white onion and lightly brown in a saucepan with two tablespoons oil for five minutes. Add six ounces raw rice and brown eight minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Moisten with a pint of broth and two gills tomato sauce, add three Spanish sweet peppers cut into small squares, three tablespoons cooked green peas, half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons white pepper and a saltspoon Spanish saffron. Mix well, cover pan and set in oven forty-five minutes, remove, dress on a vegetable dish and serve.
A straightforward pilaf built on the Spanish model: aromatics, toasted rice, saffron, and a measured amount of liquid. Two things need translating — the volumes and the oven, which the original never names.
- The liquid ratio is the hingeA pint of broth plus two gills of tomato sauce is 3 cups of liquid. Six ounces of raw rice is a scant cup by volume, so roughly 3 to 1 -- still a wet ratio that will give a soft grain. For separate grains, closer to 2 cups total liquid suits modern long-grain or Spanish bomba rice.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is 1 cup of tomato sauce. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: three saltspoons of white pepper is 3/4 teaspoon, which is assertive by current taste, and a saltspoon of saffron is about a quarter teaspoon of threads — a real quantity, worth crumbling and steeping in a spoonful of the warm broth first.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the book leaves it to the cook's judgement. A moderate oven, 350F, covered, is a reasonable reading.
- Forty-five minutes is longForty-five minutes is long by modern standards, though with the full 3 cups of liquid called for here the rice may well need it. If you cut the liquid back, start checking at 25 minutes.
- Spanish sweet peppersMost likely canned or jarred pimientos, already roasted and skinned; a jarred roasted red pepper is the nearest substitute. Cut into small squares as the recipe directs.
- Bring the pan to the oven hotAdd the broth and tomato sauce warm and let the pan come to a simmer on the burner before covering and transferring. Cold liquid into a hot pan stalls the cook and leaves the top layer chalky.
- VesselAn ovenproof saucepan or a shallow braiser with a tight lid. A wide pan gives a shallower bed of rice and cooks more evenly than a deep one.
- YieldSix ounces of rice serves three as a side dish, two as a light main.
This is arroz a la valenciana in its restaurant-French dress — the rice-and-saffron dish of Valencia, as set down in The International Cook Book, compiled in turn-of-the-century New York. Valencia's rice fields, worked since the medieval period, gave the region a dish that in its home form is paella, cooked uncovered in a wide flat pan over an open fire with whatever the marsh and garden supplied. What appears here is the tamer hotel version: no fire, no shellfish, no rabbit, just peppers, peas, tomato and saffron baked under a lid. The saffron is the tell — even in a modest vegetable side, the book calls for real Spanish saffron.