9780865475649

Chapter Two

PERFECT RICE

* * *

For most of my cooking life, I paid hardly any attention at all to ordinary rice, except that I thought I did a good job of making it. Early on, I used converted rice, not because I liked it especially but because it kept in all those "essential" vitamins--Wonder Rice--and because I had somehow imbibed the idea that rice, real rice, was difficult to make. Then, during a stretch when I was pinching every dime, I switched over to plain, supermarket-label long-grain rice. This rice was not only much cheaper, it also tasted better. Like frozen vegetables, converted rice has a vague "cooked" taste; all its flavor edges have been rubbed away in some distant processing plant. By comparison, even bargain-basement ordinary rice had a noticeably sweeter, brighter taste.

Consequently, when money started coming in again, I switched, not back to Uncle Ben's but to various premium brands of standard American long-grain rice--Carolina, River, Alma--and stayed with them. I made this rice by following the instructions on the package, performing the ritual so often that I knew the formula by heart: one cup of rice, two cups of water, a tablespoon of butter, a teaspoonful of salt. And so the years went.

Then, one evening after Matt moved permanently into my life, we had my friend Dave over for supper. I don't remember what we cooked up that night, except that it was served with rice. As I was dishing this out over at the kitchen counter, Dave said to Matt, "You know, all the years I've known him, John's always made perfect rice." I glanced over at Matt, expecting, I guess, to see a faint flush of pride or, at least, an assenting nod. Instead, I was just in time to catch, flitting across her face, a look of sheer incredulity.

I was dumbfounded. I looked down at the fluffy white stuff on the plates in front of me and poked it with the serving spoon. So, what was I doing wrong?

* * *

There are over one hundred varieties of rice grown in Burma.... Their price and taste vary. Nga kywe is the most expensive and the easiest to digest. It is the favorite for the table of the wealthy. Nga sein , which has a harder texture when cooked and is less expensive, is eaten by the farmers. Londei is the hardest and cheapest and mainly used in feeding the inmates of prisons and livestock. Many of the other varieties, such as the sweet, pink, and black rices, are used in making snacks and confections.

--Aung Aung Taik, Under the Golden Pagoda

Matt and I were then in the process of integrating our rather different cooking styles. Consequently, when we had dishes like rice and peas or tripe gumbo or dirty rice, I made the rice; when we had other dishes, like a vegetable curry or a kedgeree, Matt made it. Or rather, she made basmati rice, which she much preferred to American long-grain rice--certainly, at least, to my version of it.

Early in her wonderful book on the rice culture of the Carolinas, The Carolina Rice Kitchen , Karen Hess explains what she intends by the phrase "rice kitchen." It is meant to capture less a body of particular dishes than the almost spiritual presence that a much loved and entirely depended-on ingredient can have for a cook, serving as the basic ground in which all the other cooking in the kitchen has its roots and in relation to which it finds its meaning.

Ours is not and never can become such a kitchen, even if we wanted this. But when I read that phrase the image immediately came to me of Matt preparing rice. I saw her bent over the spread-out kernels and carefully sorting through them, grain by grain, picking out the tiny pebbles, the strange-looking seeds, the discolored and broken grains, and the dead (and sometimes not-so-dead) insects. Following this came the washing and soaking rituals, which sluiced away every trace of the stale bran dust and excess milky-white rice starch. Finally, she carefully calibrated the amount of water to add to the cooking pot. When the rice was done the pot was completely dry, the rice itself light, delicate, and fluffy, a collation of distinct and tender grains as different as day is from night to the dense, gummy stuff I made.

Talking to her about it I discovered that her devotion to all this sprang from something more than her natural fastidiousness. She found it calming, even pleasurable, this sorting. Picking through the rice meant not only removing the detritus but establishing an anticipatory connection with the rest. Raw rice has a lovely translucency and rolls under the fingers with the soothing smoothness of abacus beads. To try to put this experience into words is to exaggerate it, she said; it's something that, doing it, you just feel. Even so, it was clear she felt an affinity to rice that I did not. And her complete absorption while preparing it made me, for the first time, begin paying attention myself.

What there was to pay attention to, however, wasn't at first exactly clear. I was already curious about "gourmet" rices like Italian arborio and Asian fragrant rices. But rice itself--the plain, unparticularized fluffy white stuff--was always in the background of my imagination the way it was in my meals, like a slice of sandwich loaf in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

In a way, that was the price I paid, coming from a culture so absurdly wealthy that it lacks an essential starch to connect all the basic dishes of its cuisine, framing them within its own distinctive taste. For the Chinese--at least those who come from southern China--that grain is so central, so much the meal, and what is served with it merely the enhancements, that, as E. N. Anderson writes in The Food of China:

the phrase chih fan (to eat rice) also means simply "to eat," and the word fan (cooked rice, cooked grain) also means simply "food." A southerner who has not eaten rice all day will deny having eaten at all, although he or she may have consumed a large quantity of snacks. A meal without rice just isn't a meal.... [A meal] is made up of cooked rice and sung ..., a Cantonese word that may best be translated as "topping for rice" or "dishes to put on the rice." Sung includes everything else, all combined into dishes that are, indeed, put on the rice (and in a poor-to-ordinary home are little more than flavorings for it).

If I got hungry an hour after eating in a Chinese restaurant, it was because, ordering some fan with my sung , I had got the thing the wrong way around. That tiny bowl of rice that came with the roast duck and chicken with cashews and vegetable moo shi was ordered out of politeness, a bit of "When in Rome ..." I hadn't come there to eat rice; I didn't even particularly want it. Consequently, reading that the average Chinese still nourished by the traditional cuisine eats eight cups of cooked white rice a day, I unreflectively imagined the stuff as a kind of undifferentiated starchy filler crammed down out of sheer, driving hunger.

This, of course, reveals a naive (but still embarrassing) cultural prejudice. It never occurred to me that such a Chinese eater might actually look to the texture, flavor, and aroma of rice for the same aesthetic nourishment that I had come to search for in a piece of bread, and, furthermore, might find it there. Having fought my way to that relationship with my daily bread, you would think that by extension this connection would be obvious. But no, if life teaches us anything, it is that such provincialisms must be uprooted one by stubborn one.

Indeed, as I was about to discover, a forest of cultural confusion stood between me and that simple bowl of perfect boiled rice. Matt, reading Julie Sahni, had spent months mastering the art of preparing basmati rice, a naturally perfumed (the word in Hindi literally means "queen of fragrance") long-grain rice with a distinctive "tender spongy" (Julie Sahni's phrase) texture. Although I didn't confess this to her for some time, I was finding it very hard to accept basmati rice as rice. For me, it was always " basmati rice." When this finally spilled out, I had to admit further--still more cultural chauvinism--that its sandalwood-tinged aroma and ephemeral texture vaguely irritated me. Basmati seemed to me the rice of a thin people; all fragrance and ephemerality. I wanted our house rice--our rice--to have body to it, the familiar, firm resiliency of American long-grain rice.

So, after bringing into the open this secret ambivalence that existed between us--my uncomfortableness with her rice and hers with mine--we were faced with either pursuing a two-rice cuisine or finding a rice and a way of cooking it that brought to table the qualities that both of us wanted from that grain. So, together, we plunged into several months of experiment, trials ... and errors.

* * *

The English, or rather the Anglo-Indian, method of boiling rice is more laborious but less likely to yield a glutinous mess. Set on your stove three large vessels of water. When all are boiling cast the rice into the first. Ten minutes later drain the partially cooked grains in a colander. Wash them with the boiling contents of the second pot and then put them into the third to complete their cooking.

--Peter Gray, The Mistress Cook

Plain boiled long-grain rice: how can something be easy to do if almost every cook insists on a different--sometimes entirely different--way of preparing it? Pick up a handful of cookbooks and you experience a riot of conflicting instructions. I don't think there's a single step in making rice where you will not find one instruction countermanded by its opposite, argued with equal authority. Wash/don't wash; wash before cooking/wash after cooking; cook in lots of water/cook in just enough water; cook for a long time/cook for a short time ... and on and on.

Compare rice with pasta, a basic starch that comes with its cooking method already built in. You don't need a cookbook to teach you how to prepare spaghetti. It cooks up fast, it cooks up easy, and it cooks up right. That is why there's no such thing as Minute Pasta or Success Pasta. And it is also why no one tells you what a snap it is to cook. You already know.

Cooking also follows the laws of evolution: successful methods crowd out all others. If there's no simple method for cooking rice, it isn't because the right genius hasn't yet come along to set us straight (there are already too many vying for that role), but because rice cooking is attempting the unnatural. It means to force those grains of rice to do something they don't particularly want to do.

If you come from a non-rice-cooking culture and trust your instinct to cook rice right, your instinct will let you down. Toss a handful of those tiny, pearlescent grains into a pot of boiling water and let them do their thing, and the grains become not soft but soggy. Pressed gently with a finger, they collapse to mush. Measure the water so that the grains absorb it all while cooking, and you get that familiar dense, gummy, sticky mass.

What, though, is wrong with that? Abstractly--nothing. The French, for instance, cultural chauvinists from birth, seem quite happy with it: their description of perfectly cooked rice is crevé , or (to translate roughly) "burst." Taste rice prepared by someone who knows what they're doing, however, and your ignorance will lose its bliss. Well-made rice is something else again.

Still, it isn't all that easy to say what, exactly, that "something else" is. The best way to approach it, I think, is to answer an implicit question that has been hovering over this text from the start: why white rice at all? I know that readers convinced of the superiority of the unpolished grain have already started muttering, "Brown rice is natural, it is more nutritious, it is obviously less tampered with, and it has more flavor than polished rice."

All these things are true. The problem is that brown rice is also not really rice. Plain boiled rice has become, like bread, an artifact of culture, as much idea as thing. Brown rice, on the other hand, is just another edible seed--one among many equivalent grains that fill the bins of the natural foods shop: barley, millet, rye, and wheat berries, not to mention such exotics as spelt, quinoa, kamut, and hato mugi. Those who find our civilization too much for them turn to such foods as a portal to an unsullied, primal world. But the Thai or Gambian or Chinese peasant who becomes prosperous enough to set aside the coarse, rough stuff for the refined does so to acquire identity with their culture: white rice wraps the family meal with connection to the common way. For them, white rice is a doorway in .

This connection is at the heart of what rice is all about. And for the participating cooks of a rice culture, shared agreement on what rice should be lifts its preparation out of the realm of merely boiling and propels it into the platonic. To cook rice correctly requires not only patience and skill but an abstract conception of an idealized form. In perfectly cooked rice, to let one expert speak for all, "each grain is separate and dry, yet tender, not gummy or sticky."

Taken literally, these familiar adjectives most exactly describe Quaker puffed rice, or, for that matter, Rice Krispies. In rice cooking, these terms serve to create a tension between what the rice wants to do and what the cook persuades it to do. It is the vegetable equivalent of dingo becoming dog. (This, by the way, is why the dullness of instant rice extends beyond its taste; it is all obedience, its rice spirit broken instead of tamed.)

Every rice culture has its own definition of perfect rice. For the South Carolina cook, the cooked grains literally pour out of the pan like popcorn. For the Chinese cook, they are similarly individually distinct, whole, and dry, but they also hold together, so that the fingers, or chopsticks, can pluck them up in a bite-sized clump. For the Thai or Indian cook, the ideal rice is transcendentally light and soft--and the talented rice cook can take the longest, most fragile grains and cook them until exquisitely moist and tender, but still unbroken and unburst. All these are results that truly deserve that ultimate accolade.

We Americans have no such cultural consensus, which is why our notion of perfect rice is so murky and undefined--and the directions in our cookbooks so contrary. After all, much of the ritual surrounding rice is only superficially about its making. There is a short Japanese nursery rhyme about rice:

Hajimé choro choro

Naka pa ppa

Akago naité mo

Futa toru na .

First it bubbles

Then it hisses

Even if baby is crying

Don't remove the lid.

On the surface, this is a neat little onomatopoetic lesson in rice cooking (listen carefully and never peek under the lid, even if baby is wailing for its breakfast), but the Japanese housewife who, plugging in the electric rice cooker, chants it to her daughter is really instructing that little girl (and reminding herself) how nice it is to be Japanese --and, consequently, how comforting it is, doing this most Japanese of tasks.

We have no such little songs. No part of our American identity is bound to rice. Trying to prepare it, we have no established standards to absorb, no accepted method with which to test our mettle against our neighbor's, no firmly fixed feelings about texture and taste that we want our own rice pot to produce. We don't even, most of us, have a rice pot. In other words, we share no oneness through our rice. And so we don't--excepting a few Southerners, many of them black--understand the first thing about cooking it.

* * *

Unlike spaghetti and potatoes, which have their devoted fanciers in lands to which neither is indigenous, rice must be lived with to be loved--and well cooked. In non-rice-producing regions the grain is a poor thing poorly dealt with, and the passion for it which unites all people to whom it has been the cornerstone of family life is never quite understood or even believed by outsiders.

--Sheila Hibben, A Kitchen Manual

Well, what is one to do? I knew for sure that I didn't want to build my rice cooking either on an arbitrary recipe or on a romanticized identification with some arbitrarily chosen rice culture/kitchen. So what I turned to for help was the basic artisanal sense of task . Make it simple by making it particular: what can I do with this rice, this rice pot, this need, this temperament? In other words, to learn to make some facsimile of perfect rice, I had to learn to anchor it to my life.

My starting point was Alma, our choice of the supermarket brands of long-grain rice. It had the texture I wanted but not the aroma or taste. We set out to discover which American rice--if any--might possess all three. Soon, the UPS truck began rolling up the driveway with sacks of rice from Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana, some sent directly from rice mills, others from the actual growers.

Simultaneously, we worked on method. We ransacked the literature and tried out the most appealing-sounding of the techniques, including Elizabeth David's method of boiling the rice and then putting it, casseroled and buttered, to dry out in the oven. They all worked well enough, but none of them produced rice equal to Matt's basmati. The problem, I gradually realized, was that I wanted to simply follow a set of instructions, whereas what was required of me was to establish a close working relationship with a particular cooking vessel--my personal rice pot.

Although it would, in fact, become a pot almost solely devoted to rice-making, that designation as "rice pot" came from the fact that I chose it because its shape and weight somehow spoke directly to the point. I walked up and down the aisle of the kitchen-equipment store, hefting one pot after another, until a one-and-a-half-quart Calphalon saucepan made of heavy anodized aluminum, with a tight-fitting glass lid, spoke out to me, simply and directly: "I can make your rice." I believed it, bought it, and brought it home.

The fact that it is a very good pot made my work all the easier--an authentic workhorse, its solidity gave me confidence and its stolidity posed no problems of intervening temperament. Having it as my constant, I learned to be increasingly stingy with the water and more aggressive in the cooking than I had before found nerve to be. Because American cooking shares no common rice pot, rice-cooking directions always counsel moderation--but in this instance, moderation leads to mush.

When I began my exploration of rice, I happened to be baking all the bread we ate. This task required continual consideration, which, in turn, meant a slow accretion of observed detail. Part of the pleasure of eating your own bread lies in contemplating the result of today's efforts, in comparing the crust, texture, and taste of this loaf with the one made yesterday or the day before, which, in turn, brings to mind other flours, other approaches, other loaves.

The same is true with rice. In ways that matter as much as they are hard to quantify, it has gained increasing substance, presence, weight. For an inattentive eater sitting down to dinner at our table, the difference most likely would elicit no more than an appreciative grunt. However, for us, now, the shared discussion of choice of rice and the gradual articulation of a method have lent a quiet but deeply pleasing richness to the meal.

Perhaps our favorite rice right now is the long-grain Della-type grown in Cajun country and called popcorn rice after its familiar aroma (the two share a highly aromatic chemical compound). To our surprise, we found that distinctions could be made between batches of the rice grown in neighboring parishes; they were all delicious, but in subtly contrasting ways. Now when the rice is done, I bring Matt a forkful from the pot, and we taste it together consideringly, the way the mouth works a first sip of wine.

When the rice is good, this tasting is an act of unmitigated pleasure. Part of it, of course, is just whetted anticipation of the meal, but there's something else there, too ... only more difficult to explain. Dingo into dog--that connection wasn't gratuitous. A dog acquires dogness learning to sit, shake hands, roll over, and other, similar dumb pet tricks. When I got my dog Mick to sit and shake hands (rolling over was beneath his dignity), I felt silly with pleasure--exactly how I felt when I first lifted the lid of that Calphalon pot and saw that the rice had risen up of its own accord into a white and fluffy mound.

With Mick, as with rice, I wasn't showing my talents as a trainer (negligible) or his at accepting discipline (laughable)--or even the bond between us (he would do the same for anyone who offered him a biscuit). No, I was simply delighting in what I can only call his "dogness"--in which at that moment I was somehow allowed to participate. That is what the phrase "my dog" is really all about. In the same way, when I bring Matt a forkful of rice at the end of cooking, what we both delight in is neither my rice-cooking talents nor the savor of the thing but--what else can I call it?--its riceness . Our rice--we, together, have somehow managed once again to pull off the trick. And now, at least as far as Matt is concerned, I know how to make a pot of perfect rice.

PERFECT RICE

The grain seems to invite controversy. The fight over the proper way to cook it--covered or uncovered, in lots of water or a little, stirred or unstirred--is still being fought. The didactic tone of those instructing others on how to cook rice is evident in the voice of Charles Gayarré, a gourmet writing in the 1880s about an old southern cook: "Who but Valentin knew how to bake rice in an iron pot? I say iron , because it must be nothing else, and that rice must come out solid, retaining the exact shape of the pot, with a golden crust about its top and sides."

-- Woman's Day Encyclopedia of Cookery , Vol. 10

According to Karen Hess, the first rule of good rice cooking is not over cooking. Perfectly cooked long-grain rice is tender but resilient, faintly sticky but not gluey or mushy. She also insists that the rice must be left unmolested during its recovery time. This is similar to letting a roast "sit" after it's been brought out of the oven, so that the juices can redistribute themselves throughout the meat. In the rice pot, this resting time allows the moisture to penetrate to the center of each kernel and the excess to evaporate, producing firm-textured, separate grains.

Whether Karen Hess would approve of our method or its results is something we'll discover only should we ever have her over for supper. For us, though, it does the trick. Even so, I want to stress again that every instruction that follows was built on our growing familiarity with our own rice pot. So far as your own "perfect" rice is concerned, surely the right approach is to get a basic grasp of the issues involved and to work them out after your own fashion and to your own satisfaction, and at your own pace.

(Continues...)

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

We're the #1 textbook rental company. Let us show you why.

Pot on the Fire

0865475644

Summary

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials

Excerpts

Rewards Program