The Rice Man cometh

Oct 27, 2008 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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If I am what I eat, I am constituted almost entirely of bread and rice, with some bits of chicken and beans thrown in for balance.  My love for bread is already well documented and spreading (if you examine my profile).  I have stressed that if I were to be reincarnated as a fruit or vegetable, I would return as a bread-nut. I can be described as “well bread.”
As I travel through the Caribbean, when people call me “Breads” or “Breaddah”, I marvel at their perceptiveness and insight. How do they know that bread is my favourite food? My preferred hymn is “Oh Breadder Man” and my prayer of choice is the Lord’s, which includes, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
In fact, bread is the staple that holds the pages of my life together.  I once ended a column entitled “Hot Bread and Cleopatra” with, “Tony Deyal, a crusty older man, was last seen talking about the two insects that left the flour bin to go out into the world to seek fame, fortune and dough. One became a roll-model and the other, whose life was filled with many turnovers because of his half-baked schemes, died before knowing how much he was kneaded. He was always known as the lesser of the two weevils.”
However, I am also a rice man of repute.  My East Indian ancestry has ensured that rice eating is engrained in me.  When it comes to rice, I am a cereal killer.  I saw an Editorial entitled, “Rice With Spice Is Twice As Nice” in the “Monks’ Cookbook,” which has vegetarian recipes from Kauai’s Hindu Monastery.
The writer enthused poetically, “Prolog: Behold life’s passing into paradise.  How like a languid Vedic sacrifice, with days and years poured into flames of soul in rites precise.  How randomless, this intertwined device, where lice have cats and cats have mice.  How bountifully it folds eternity into each tiny thrice, and hugely unconcise, with fire and ice and fifty thousand kinds of rice.  How nice is rice, especially served with spice.  How it can, at meagre price, twice or thrice each day suffice.  How gently and how very free from vice are those whose fodder, in the main, is rice.”
While “lice” might be a tasteless reference to Oriental pronunciation, the “free from vice” business best describes me and my lifestyle (except for my love of bread and rice) which was not always thus.  But then I ate “Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice” and became a changed man forever.  I claim that my sex life changed when I started eating “Minute Rice” but that is another story.
The real deal is that there are over 40,000 varieties of rice, and it is grown throughout the world.  The names are, in many cases, exotic.  In Australia you can get Amaroo, Reiqiz and Jarrah, which are semi-dwarf medium grained, or Kyema, tall and fragrant.  Bangladesh has Chinigura and Kaligira, and something called “Hori Dhan” (Dhan is Hindi for rice).
In Italy you can find Vialone Nano and Carnaroli; Spain has Bahia and Bomba; Thailand has Jasmine; but the queen of them all is Basmati, the famous, aromatic, long-grained rice from India and Pakistan.  I remember when my two younger children, Jasmine and Zubin, were infants.  We bought Jasmine rice in the supermarket and Zubin was extremely upset that we had not bought any Zubin rice.  He was crushed but not converted.
One of the things I learnt about rice was not just its universality, but the fact that what in Trinidad is called “pelau” (rice, peas and chicken cooked together) is a common global phenomenon.  According to Wikipedia, “Pilaf, also called polao, pilau or pulao, is a dish in which a grain, such as rice or cracked wheat, is browned in oil and then cooked in a seasoned broth.  Depending on the local cuisine, it may also contain a variety of meat and vegetables.
Pilaf and similar dishes are common to Middle Eastern, Central, South Asian, Latin American and Caribbean cuisine.”  The historical link is fascinating. According to Wikipedia, one of the earliest literary references to pilau can be found in the histories of Alexander the Great, when he described the birthplace of his wife Roxana in what is now known as Afghanistan.
Pelau was served to Alexander when he was captured in Samarkand, and he and his army brought it back to Macedonia and it spread through Eastern Europe.  In Uzbekistan, where it is called “plov,” it is believed that proper preparation of pilaf was first documented by a tenth-century scholar, Abu Ali Ibn Sina or Avicenna, a polymath, physician and philosopher who, in his books on medical sciences, dedicated the whole section on preparing various meals, including several types of pilaf, as well as describing advantages and disadvantages of every item used for preparing it.
While some Uzbeks think of Ibn Sina as the “father” of pilaf, there are many of us from Trinidad who would be condemned for “murdering” it.  My children would be tried as adults because of their appetites for pelau, and not as juveniles.  The Greeks call it “pulafi”, in Hebrew it is “pilaf”, in Assam it is known as “polao”, in Spain it is “paella,” and in our home in Antigua it is simply delicious.
I also thought that my love for the burnt, brownish-yellowish bit at the bottom of the pot, in Trinidad known as the “bun-bun” as in “burn-burn”, might be merely an aberration.  However, this is referred to as the “golden rice crust” and is the prized portion of many pilaff pundits throughout the world.
As you, dear reader, may have discovered by now, whatever my demerits, when I sin, whether it takes a minute or more, I do so in very good company, all rice converts.
There is even rice-lore about whether you eat with chopsticks, forks or your fingers.  According to the Monks’ Cookbook, “In India it is said that ‘Rice should be like brothers: close but not stuck together.’ But Thais were accustomed to rice that, like Thai people, stick together…My theory is that cultures that eat with chopsticks evolved sticky kinds; fork-eaters selected very dry specimens, and those of us who eat with our hands developed in-between varieties.”   In other words, if we want Caribbean unity, we need to develop a highly glutinous rice and eat our pelau (or what is called in Mandarin — zhua fan) with chopsticks.
*Tony Deyal, after a late night feast of pelau, dreamt that he was last seen in Buckingham Palace being knighted by the Queen for his services to his favourite dish. She placed the sword on his shoulder and said, “A-Rice Sir Tony.”

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