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Spanish Rice
5 small onions 1 cupful hot water Salt and red pepper to taste 1/4 cupful chopped olives Wash rice and put it in bowl, add Crisco, seasonings, cheese, hot water, tomatoes, olives, and onions cut in small pieces. Turn into a Criscoed fireproof dish and bake in moderate oven one hour, or until rice is tender.
The ingredient list as printed has lost several lines — rice, Crisco, cheese and tomatoes all appear in the method but never in the quantities column. The instructions still work, but you are reconstructing proportions.
- The missing amountsOnly the onions, water, olives and seasoning survive in the list. For a dish of this era and pan size, expect roughly 1 cup raw long-grain rice, 2 tablespoons Crisco, about half a cup of grated cheese and a pint or 2-cup can of tomatoes; treat those as a reconstruction, not the original text.
- Liquid to riceOne cup of hot water alone will not cook a cup of rice. The tomatoes are carrying most of the moisture, so use canned tomatoes with their juice rather than drained or fresh ones, and check at 40 minutes — add hot water if the top layer is still chalky.
- Moderate oven350F. Cover the dish for the first 45 minutes so the rice steams, then uncover for the last stretch if you want a browned top.
- CriscoStill sold, and this book exists to sell it. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works; butter or olive oil both suit the dish better than shortening, though butter will brown the top faster.
- "Criscoed" dishSimply greased. A fireproof dish is one that goes straight into the oven; in 1913 that meant fireproof earthenware or china, though any modern 1.5- to 2-quart casserole, glass included, will do.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not a bell pepper. Start with an eighth of a teaspoon and add more if you want it; the recipe leaves the amount entirely to you.
- The onionsFive small raw onions cut small is a lot of onion for a cup of rice, and they will steam rather than sweeten. Softening them in the fat first gives a far better result than the book's all-in-one method.
- YieldRoughly four servings as a main course, six as a side; the original gives no yield.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to explain what to do with a wholly new product: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a solid white fat that was neither lard nor butter. Its recipes are ordinary American home cooking with Crisco written into every step, down to the use of "to Crisco" a dish as a verb. This Spanish Rice belongs to a long line of American dishes given Spanish or Mexican names on the strength of tomato, onion and a pinch of red pepper, from "Spanish sauce" through to the boxed rice mixes of the twentieth century, and which has little to do with the rice cookery of Spain. Crisco is often said to have been marketed to kosher households and to the meatless-cookery movement, on the grounds that it was a shortening that came from neither pig nor cow.