[Sca-cooks] Serving stuff over rice

[Johnna Holloway]

Over rice is a common phrase today, but in actuality rice would have been expensive, unless one is living in the rice growing areas. Adamson mentions it was a luxury foodstuff in the 13th century, but by the 15th century was being traded cross Europe and most often used as rice flour. 

Today rice is cheap and filling. And the ads for various modern rice dishes often promote instructions or serving advice such as "serve on the side" or "serve over rice." 

Also what is the cultural influence of the modern American food scene? We are very accustomed today to eating Asian dishes with rice. Certainly medieval Europeans would not have been so accustomed to it. 

Dishes, all sorts of dishes, are routinely photographed over rice, including many in Middle Eastern cookbooks.  That may influence how we think about serving rice and other foods.

I would suspect that serving meats or vegetables over rice became traditional or customary at our Society feasts in part because it's convenient and saves on the number of serving dishes needed. 

Why use three serving dishes if or when the food can be served on one platter per table? Who wants to purchase or use more dishes than necessary? Or wash them later? So we combine dishes and serve them together.


Johnnae

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 22, 2013, at 11:48 PM, David Friedman <ddfr at daviddfriedman.com> wrote:

> My standard way of serving various period Islamic dishes is on top of rice. Urtatim recently suggested to me that that might be wrong, historically speaking. Checking the obvious sources, I cannot find any period reference to food being served that way. The closest I can come is a recipe where you cook rice in milk and then put meat on it and serve it--but most rice recipes are considerably more elaborate than that and I didn't find anything along the lines of "and serve it over rice."
> 
> Does anyone here have evidence for or against the claim that that was how it was served?
>