I love rice! Rice, that staple of low-country cuisine, holds a place near and dear to my heart. It seemed to appear at nearly every meal on our table when I was a kid. Stew Beef over rice, fried chicken with rice and gravy, chicken and rice and yes, JB's famous chicken bog were all staples at 105 South Cook Street. I loved it, and would sometimes eat a bowl of plain rice. Cheryl Waters Murdock and I share the same sentiment over rice. I like it dry, I like it gummy; I don't care how it turns out, I find it yummy!
Rice is pretty unique. Rice is cultivated on every continent except for Antarctica and has been cultivated since the Old Testament days. In America, we eat 20 lbs of rice per person every year and in Asia they eat an average of 300 lbs per person. That is a bunch of rice! Even the Great Wall of China is held together with rice. If you have ever made a pot of rice and scorched it, you know how tough it can be to scrape it off.
The starch in rice makes for a tough glue and it was used as a mortar to hold the stones together for the wall. After all, the old saying "for all the rice in China" must be true....there is plenty of it there. Rice also lasts for a long time.Uncooked rice stays edible for ten to thirty years, depending on the humidity of where it is stored. Don't try the same thing with brown rice, though. Brown rice is the same as white rice but the bran and the germ aren't removed by milling; the bran and germ are the two components that oxidize and thus spoil the rice. Interestingly, all rice starts out brown.....the milling process removes the husk, bran and germ which results in the polished white grains that then find their way into your pot, rice cooker or wok and ultimately to your table.
My favorite property of rice is how it starts out. Open that bag of rice and you are greeted with something coarse and grainy. Try to eat it raw and it isn't very satisfying! But, baptize that rice and put it under duress, under the stress of boiling water for just about twenty minutes and it is transformed into something I can only describe as a miracle! Oh boy! What once was tough is now tender and delectable and willing to please the palate!
My Mama was good for “inventing” phrases and one of her oft-repeated sayings was “Have a rice day”. She adopted it from the Rice Crispies commercial that aired in the early 1970s that featured a family enjoying bowls of Rice Crispies before enjoying a day of family fellowship and fun. Mama and Daddy were all about family, and we did everything together, as a family. Every day when she would drop us off for school she left us with the admonition to “Have a rice day!” and the phrase was entered into the lexicon of the Johnson family. When you hear me use it, it is my personal reminder that she lives on forever within me.
I think you can make the correlation here.....life can make you coarse, tough and abrasive but sometimes the duress of heat can break you down, transform you into something totally different that is satisfying and nourishing. Just add a baptism of hot water and see what results. Have a rice day, y'all!