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.
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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.
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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 those who would know, as if we should be ingesting stuff that primitives ate to catch buffaloes. Apparently brown rice, although nutritious, is not ‘ancient’. Modern dilemmas.
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Brown rice salad for a 1970 buffet dinner party.
Temper all quantities to your requirements, and aim for evenness of colour and balance of crunch and non-crunch. Put on some pre-dinner music. Bobbie Gentry’s voice seems to have a pre-dinner party calming effect. Boil and then simmer brown rice until tender, about 45 minutes. Cool (the rice). Chop and deseed two ripe tomatoes. Chop some fresh celery and a green capsicum. Cut a garlic clove in half and run it around the Dansk wooden bowl bought from George’s of Collins Street at their half-yearly clearance. (Actual discrete garlic in the salad might be a bridge too far. Give it time.) Cut a Spanish onion into neat vari-sized Olympic rings to spangle the top like her oversized earrings. De-pit some black olives - Victoria market - and cut them into halves. Shell and boil some peas, or cheat and use Continental Surprise Peas, freeze-dried and ready in three minutes. Cut up some spring onions. Chop half a cup of parsley. Make a dressing; get one of the kids to go outside and pick a lemon, then combine the juice with vinegar and oil. Use olive oil if available. Combine cooked and cooled rice with vegetables, and dress. Also dress the rice.
When your guests arrive, having parked their mustard SAAB 99 on the gravel under the coachlight in front, switch up the mood with Dave Brubeck on the BSR turntable and serve Quelltaler hock in blue-glass hand-blown wine goblets.
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But I still couldn’t warm to the pudding. I was always reminded of the A. A. Milne poem, substituting ‘ … and it’s brown rice pudding for dinner again …’.
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