On Cooking Rice
Advances in technology have made cooking rice easier and easier, more and more convenient. All you have to do is wash the rice, put it in an electric rice cooker, add some water, press the switch, and everything is taken care of. You can safely go watch a ball game on television, get on the computer, or do whatever you want without worrying that the rice will burn or scorch.
But rice cooked in an electric cooker lacks another pleasure—the pleasure of chewing on crispy rice crust.
I remember that when we were children, after we had finished eating, Mother would scrape the crust from the bottom of the pot, spread a little lard on it, sprinkle it with salt, and break off a small piece for each child. In the mouth it went crunch, crunch—crisp and fragrant. Even now, just thinking about it makes my mouth water.
If you want rice crust, first of all you must know how to cook rice. Cooking rice is easy and difficult at the same time. Everything depends on controlling the fire properly. The key is to remove the strong heat just as the water is nearly gone, then let the remaining heat slowly roast the rice. The layer at the bottom dries and browns, becoming fragrant rice crust.
But during the years of grain rationing, few people deliberately cooked rice in a way that produced crust. During the Cultural Revolution, both my wife and I worked. After our shifts we often could not go straight home. We had to remain in the workshop for the “unshakable” study of Chairman Mao’s writings. By the time we got home, lights were already glowing in thousands of households. It was too late to begin cooking rice then.
Our daughter was seven and came home from school earlier. My wife taught her how to light the stove and cook rice. After that, the task fell to her. When the adults came home, all we had to do was stir-fry a few dishes and we could eat.
One day, our daughter came home from school, washed the rice, and put the pot on the honeycomb-coal stove. Then she went inside to do homework with a classmate. The two little girls discussed arithmetic problems as they worked and completely forgot about the rice.
By the time they smelled something burning, they rushed out and lifted the pot away. The bottom layer had turned black, with a sharp scorched smell.
When we returned from work, our daughter’s eyes were red and her face miserable. Her mother gave her a scolding.
A child that young was really pitiful. But in those days when “grain was life,” who would not become anxious?
People in Yunnan cooked rice differently from us Cantonese. Cantonese people liked to cook rice in clay pots. Yunnan people were accustomed to steaming it.
They put the rice into a large iron pot of boiling water without worrying much about how much water there was. After the rice boiled for several minutes and the grains were just beginning to split, they scooped it out with a strainer and placed it in a cloth-lined steamer. The rice water from the pot was poured into another basin. Fresh water was then put into the pot below, and the rice was steamed above it.
Yunnan people liked to drink rice water with their meal. Cantonese people preferred a good savory soup before eating. And with steamed rice, of course, there was no rice crust to enjoy.
Over the decades I have cooked rice with charcoal, firewood, chunks of coal, coal briquettes, and honeycomb coal. When I was a bachelor I even used a kerosene stove—one I hammered together myself from sheet metal, milk cans, and biscuit tins. Every kind of fuel had its own tricks and experience.
Now I am already over seventy, but my teeth are still good, and I still deeply miss the pleasure of chewing on that crisp rice crust.
You can make rice crust on a gas stove today, too, but it takes some attention. Still, when the craving starts scratching at me, I occasionally make some.