Seductions of rice and Maurice Sendak

I have always had a love hate relationship with rice. I didn’t mind it much growing up. My diet consisted of two rotis with dal and sabzi and a handful of rice to finish off the meal.
The hating began when I started living in a working women’s hostel in Bombay. Every day dinner consisted of rice and a ladle of watery gravy with some scraggly vegetables thrown in. I subsisted on the monotonous meal for a few months before it hit me that I could afford to sneak in a restaurant bought gravy to eat with my rice. It did not in any way diminish the fact that I was forced to eat rice every day and rotis were a weekend luxury at a cousin’s house.
After moving back home and then subsequently getting married, I stayed away from rice as much as I could. Not till I set up my household and got in the grind of every day cooking did it dawn on me how simple the process of making rice was compared to that of making rotis. The first dish I cooked in the microwave (having never used it before coming to the US), was rice.

I was shown by T how easy it was to cook a cup of rice in 15 minutes flat.

Wash the rice 2-3 times in water, pour two cups of water and zap in the microwave for ten minutes, uncovered and another minute or two covered. Boom… the rice was ready.

From Top to clockwise: Wild Rice, Basmati, Parboiled Rice, Ponni Rice and Brown Basmati

Not till I started blogging and exploring the wonderful world of food blogging that I realized how many different varieties of rice were out there. Above is the five types of rice I have in my pantry.

Recently, we acquired Jeffery Alford and Naomi Duguid’s ‘Seductions of Rice’ and were blown away by their years of research and accounts of varieties of rice from all over the world. Here’s an excerpt I found particularly interesting and amusing about the way people in the South and the North of India eat their rice:

“One last word about rice in India and that has to do with eating it. Most people in India eat rice with their right hand, though there are different styles used. People in the south of India joke about how people in the north eat so politely with the ends of their fingers that they look as if they are afraid of getting a grain of rice up past their second knuckle. People in the north think that the people in the south, who eat their rice fingers, palm and all, look crude.”

This is what they say about eating the south Indian way:

“The most important thing to remember when eating rice with your hand is to loosen up and have fun. Here, you can be a kid again. In Southern India, it’s perfectly fine to mush your food around, to make piles of rice and add little bits of curry and pickle and crispy chips or pappadum. When you have the tasty pile just the way you want it, pick it up in your palm and shake it back and forth as if you were about to roll dice at a craps table. This helps the form the pile into a ball, about the size of a gold ball. And then, with a turn of the wrist, pop it in your mouth. This is the way it is done in South India; the secret is in the wrist, in keeping a loose wrist.”

If that way of eating rice doesn’t sound appealing (can you tell I am from the north?), here’s a children’s song by Maurice Sendak, guaranteed to get your kid to eat some chicken soup with rice. He is one of the most acclaimed children’s author and illustrator in the States. But growing up in India, I had never heard of him till a friend gave my son ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ book for his second birthday. He loved it so much, I was reading the book six times a day for two months straight. I am not kidding! By the end of two weeks I could recite it in my sleep.
Wild Things led us to Sendak’s other works and ‘Chicken Soup with Rice’ has since become another favorite bedtime book. Instead of writing the whole rhyme, here’s a you tube video of the song. Also check out his ‘A Alligators all around’, ‘One Was Johnny’ and ‘Once there was a boy name Pierre’.

I am sending off these seductions of rice and chicken soup to Sra’s The Write Taste event.