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Rice Water
2 tablespoons rice Salt for seasoning 3 cups cold water Cream or milk Wash rice by placing in strainer and allowing cold water to run through. Soak 30 minutes in cold water, heat gradually to boiling point until rice is soft. Strain, reheat rice water, season with salt, and if too thick dilute with boiling water. Add milk or cream as the case may require.
A thin rice decoction from the invalid-cookery chapter, meant as a light nourishing drink rather than a cereal. The printed text is scrambled, so read it with a critical eye before starting.
- The missing quantityNo amount of rice is given, and the stray line "2 tablespoons barley" at the foot appears to have strayed in from a neighbouring recipe, most likely a barley water. Working from comparable period recipes, 2 tablespoons of rice to 3 cups of water gives the right consistency, but the original as printed is genuinely incomplete.
- Rice to useThe recipe does not say, but a plain white long- or medium-grain rice is the likely intention. Brown rice will not break down the same way and gives a darker, grainier liquid; parboiled rice releases very little starch, which defeats the purpose.
- Heat graduallyThe instruction to bring it up slowly is not decoration. A slow rise lets the grains swell and shed starch into the water; dropping rice into already-boiling water sets the outside and yields a thin, characterless liquid.
- How long "until soft" isExpect 45 minutes to an hour at a bare simmer, well past the point where you would eat the rice. Keep a lid ajar and top up with boiling water as it reduces.
- StrainingPour through a fine sieve and press the grains lightly with the back of a spoon; do not force the pulp through unless you want a thicker gruel. The drained rice itself is still usable in a pudding.
- Seasoning and dilutionSalt is the only seasoning called for, and it should be light. A little sugar, or a strip of lemon peel added during the simmer, turns up in other period recipes for invalid drinks and does no harm.
- Yield and keepingAbout 2 to 2 1/2 cups after straining, or two servings. It is a low-acid starchy liquid, so refrigerate promptly and use within a day; reheat to a full boil before serving again.
- What it is notThis is a bland fluid, not a treatment. Rice water was standard sickroom fare for a century, but anyone actually dehydrated needs a modern oral rehydration solution, which is formulated with measured salt and glucose.
Invalid cookery was a fixed department in American and British household books from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1930s, and rice water was one of its four or five staples alongside barley water, beef tea, gruel and toast water. The logic largely predated bacteriological ideas of disease, though the department persisted well after germ theory: a patient with fever or a disordered stomach was thought to need fluid and the mildest possible nourishment, and a strained starch decoction supplied both without "taxing" digestion. Rice water has a much longer life outside these books, being long used across South and East Asia as a drink in its own right and as a remedy for looseness of the bowels, and the modern oral rehydration literature has taken a serious interest in rice-based solutions. Its presence in a cookbook like this one reflects the era's expectation that nursing a sick household member was ordinary kitchen work, not a job for anyone else.