2nd
Julia Moskin’s article on the “oh my god, so exotic” rice cooker.
Like the “one billion” Chinese people mentioned, I too had never cooked rice on a stovetop until maybe a year ago. I’ve taken to buying sacks of Thai brown rice instead of regular white rice (because it’s nutritious and has that nice floral smell), and I was shocked when my trusty circa-1980’s Tatung rice cooker didn’t make it cook enough after the first cycle. Nor the second. So I cook brown rice on the stove, until I upgrade to a slightly better rice cooker.
Though this article is nicely thorough, I catch whiffs of Eastern exoticism. She uses the word “mystifical” and “mystifying” both when talking about rice cookers, and uses “surprisingly” here:
“An Asian measuring method is surprisingly reliable: with the tip of the index finger resting on the top of the rice, add water until it rises just above the first knuckle.”
This was how I was taught to measure water for rice from day one.
On a random note, there was an interesting aside about how the Japanese view rice that’s stuck to the bottom of a cooker that’s dried and crispy (we recently garnished a dish with this stuff, which I’m told by Daniel is called “pega” — meaning “stuck” — in Spanish):
“(Japanese cooks, however, consider toasted rice overcooked and highly undesirable. The unwanted crust left stuck to the bottom of the rice cooker is called okoge — the same word used as slang for a single woman who spends a lot of time with gay men.)”
