Things suffer by comparison. How cruel, for example to feed children, for years, a dessert of light, fluffy, golden-yellow baked white rice pudding studded with fat moist sultanas and topped with a sweet cinnamon-speckled skin of milk and egg; and then to suddenly change the main ingredient to brown rice. * The faces of my three much younger siblings are freeze-frames as they gaze at their newly-brown desserts, having experienced a taste that is closer to dusky earthiness than the honeyed sky of its predecessor. It was permanent. The family has jointly graduated overnight, as it were, to the brown revolution: bread, rice, scones, hot cross buns, pasta, cakes, pie crust (see ‘hunza pie’); everything that can possibly be brown or wholemeal, is. * Brown rice dragged its 1960s reputation through time like an aging hippie who still plays Jefferson Airplane cassettes in his Kombi. Meanwhile other grain fads emerged and retreated. Right now ‘ancient’ as a grain descriptor seems important to...
Recipes and ruminations from a small house in a big city.