This Side of the Pond

I feel the need to defend my people, for the entire planet is currently mocking our relationship with the humblest of pantry ingredients: rice. I knew I’d stepped into a parallel world when I moved to Wyoming – a place where everything is just different enough to be confusing – but every so often something still stops me in my tracks.

There’s a video doing the rounds of the internet by a Malaysian comedian called Nigel Ng, who lives in London and goes by the persona of “Uncle Roger”. In this video, he is watching a British chef as she cooks a version of egg fried rice in a segment produced for BBC Good Foods.

He is, to put it mildly, outraged by her technique, and it’s hilarious. He is first taken aback by her advice to add one part rice and two parts water to your pan, using a teacup to do the measuring.

“Why you measure water with cup?” he gasps. “Just use finger!”

This transgression is nowhere near as upsetting to Uncle Roger as the fact that our British chef then adds the rice without washing it (“Stinky!”), waits for it to cook, then drains it in a colander and rinses it under the faucet.

Never in his life has Uncle Roger seen such blasphemy. “You killing me, woman!” he says.

When she gets to the stage of adding other ingredients, he wonders, why no MSG? Uncle Roger believes the rice is tasteless without it.

Feeling sad? MSG, he says. Feeling happy? MSG. Have a new baby? Put MSG on it, it’ll be a better baby.

Perhaps her most egregious crime comes at the end, when she serves the finished dish using a metal spoon. This is a nonstick pan, says Uncle Roger, and if there’s anything guaranteed to make an Asian person unhappy, it’s scratching the pan with a metal spoon.

In fact, he says, if he did this at home in Malaysia, he’d be disowned. “No more parents,” he says.

A friend sent this video to me a few nights ago and I laughed as hard as anyone. I told her I found it especially funny because that’s the way I cook rice, too.

My friend was horrified. Like Uncle Roger, she had never seen anyone cook rice with the aid of a colander. By the next morning, she’d told her mother, who told the story to everyone she interacted with that day, who no doubt shared it with their own friends.

And so this column was born: an attempt to stem the flow before I become famous across the Midwest as the weirdo wielding a colander. I believe I know why this British chef was cooking rice in a way that makes no sense to American viewers, and it has to do with where we got our most popular rice dishes from.

Chinese immigrants offered up chow mein to be this country’s own version of classic Chinese cuisine, using locally available ingredients and catering to local tastes. In a similar manner, we in Britain were graced with unique and delicious recipes from our friends in India, including chicken tikka masala, kedgeree and Mulligatawny soup.

You’d have a harder time finding those dishes in India, because they were developed by Indian chefs in Britain, adapted to British tastes. I’ll note that even the soup involves the use of rice, and I believe this is how rice became a necessary item on our grocery lists.

Tikka masala, now one of the most popular meals in the UK, is often lauded as proof of the benefits of multiculturalism. As Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said in Parliament, it’s now “a true British national dish, not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences. Chicken tikka is an Indian dish. The masala sauce was added to satisfy the desire of British people to have their meat served in gravy.”

I would agree with this sentiment. I can’t imagine a world without tikka masala and chow mein, which means I also can’t imagine a world without the clash of rice-cooking philosophies that has me rushing to explain myself this week.

So here’s where the difference comes in. In India, particularly when it comes to the less starchy basmati grain, a common method for cooking rice is to measure out two parts water to one part rice, boil until soft and then strain. This is almost the method the chef in the video uses, except most recipes I found that use this “fast boil” method do recommend washing your rice before it cooks in order to remove excess starch, which prevents it from getting sticky.

Personally, I rinse my rice at the beginning of the cooking process. I can also say with confidence and fervor that metal spoons have never had a place near my stainless steel cookware.

But the basics of the method used by the lady from BBC Good Foods are the same as the one I’ve always used, and which I’ve always assumed was the “normal” way to cook rice. While it’s easy to forget that “normal” looks different to everyone, some things you just don’t ever really think about as being open to alternative possibilities.

The video was dealing with a dish that’s not from India, of course, and I am therefore prepared to admit that the chef’s demonstration was not the correct way to cook the basic ingredient of a fried rice. Considering the origin of the dish, it does seem logical to follow the expected routine if you want it to taste authentic.

However, in conclusion, I would like to defend we British cooks for our rice-based transgressions because I believe we have been dutifully following the instructions we’d been given to cook rice all along. It’s just that those instructions didn’t come from the people who specialize in egg fried rice.

I am still a little worried I might be approaching my potatoes all wrong, though.