Home › Breakfast Dishes › Ground Rice
Ground Rice
One teaspoonful of ground rice wet in cold water, one half pint of boiling water. Let boil up once.
This is a thin rice gruel of the kind kept for invalids and small children, not a bowl of porridge. Read the proportions before you commit to them.
- The proportions are extremely thinOne teaspoon of rice flour to a full cup of water gives a barely thickened liquid, close to rice water. That is deliberate in invalid cookery, but if you want a spoonable breakfast cereal you need roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons of rice flour per cup of liquid.
- Ground riceGround raw rice, not ground cooked rice. Today's nearest equivalents are rice flour or "cream of rice," though period ground rice was often a little coarser than modern fine-milled rice flour; in British usage the same term covers the coarser meal sold for puddings.
- Half a pintOne cup, 8 fl oz. American pints run 16 oz; a British book of the same date would mean 10 oz, so if you are working from an English edition scale up slightly.
- Wet in cold water firstThis is the hinge. Rice flour dropped into boiling water seizes into lumps instantly, so slake it in a tablespoon or two of cold water to a smooth cream, then stir that into the boiling water.
- "Let boil up once"Enough for a slurry this dilute, but thicker versions need 5 to 10 minutes of gentle simmering with frequent stirring. Rice starch tastes raw and chalky until it has cooked out.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none. A pinch of salt in the water, and milk, cream, sugar or a little nutmeg at the table are the usual accompaniments for a dish of this kind, though the recipe leaves it entirely open.
- YieldOne cup — a single small serving, or a feeding cup for someone unwell.
Ground rice belonged to the sickroom as much as the breakfast table. Nineteenth-century household books commonly grouped rice flour, arrowroot, sago and barley together as thin, bland, easily swallowed starches given to the sick and to weaning infants, with strength adjusted by how much flour went into the water. Milled rice reached American kitchens cheaply from the Carolina and later Louisiana rice trade. A dish like this reflects a period when the family cook was also the household nurse, and the same book had to serve both jobs.