Food writer Bee Wilson celebrates the cookbook that’s regarded as the definitive work about the world’s most universal food
Before I had kids, in the late 1990s, I was a far more ambitious cook than I am now. A MasterChef semi-finalist, I thought nothing of spending hours making shellfish stock from crab shells or hand-rolling tortelloni simply for a “garnish”. But I had a secret. I couldn’t cook rice. My idea of rice cookery was boiling it hard in a surplus of salty water, as if it were pasta. I was only rescued from my fear of cooking rice when a kind friend urged me to read The Rice Book by Sri Owen, which had been published a few years earlier, in 1993.
At last, here was someone who could talk me through the mysteries of the “absorption method” and make it sound simple. Owen, an Indonesian food writer, tells us that she “grew up among rice fields” and she writes with such an infectious passion for rice that suddenly my fears seemed absurd.
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