The regional table / Minnesota
Wild Rice Soup
The grain is manoomin, the soup is older than the cream in it, and Minnesota has written into law the difference between the rice off a lake and the rice out of a paddy.
Wild rice is not rice and it is not wild in the sense of being unclaimed. It is manoomin in Ojibwe and psin in Dakota, a grain of the lakes and slow rivers, and it sits at the centre of Anishinaabe life rather than at the edge of it: the Minnesota Historical Society's encyclopedia entry on wild rice and the Ojibwe records the migration west from the east coast in search of a homeland "where the food floats on water", which the people recognised in the rice growing around Gichigami, Lake Superior. It is harvested from a canoe in pairs during manoominike giizis, the wild rice moon, one person poling and the other bending the heads over the gunwale with knocking sticks, bawa'iganaakoog; the green rice is then parched over fire, threshed by being danced on — jigging — and winnowed in birch bark trays, nooshkaachinaaganan. Two federal reports print the same work a century ago. Frances Densmore, in Chippewa Customs, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 86 of 1929, writes that each group of relatives had its share of the rice field "as it had its share of the sugar bush, and this right was never disputed", that "the implements used in the harvesting were two sticks about 24 inches long", and that the treading was done by a man in clean moccasins leaning on a pole, "the motion being not unlike that of a dancer". Albert Ernest Jenks, whose study of the wild rice gatherers of the upper lakes fills much of the Nineteenth Annual Report of the same Bureau for 1900, is the one who puts the soup itself on the record: "The Indian is very fond of soups, and wild rice is commonly used by him to thicken food of this kind." He quotes an earlier description from Green Bay — "It is used to thicken their broth of venison, bear, fish, and fowl: it is very nutritious and palatable" — and one of the Dakota calling it "excellent with game broth". Rice in broth is the old form of this dish. The cream is the new part.
Which rice you buy is a legal question in Minnesota, and the statutes are worth reading before the recipe. Wild rice has been the official state grain since 1977 under Minn. Stat. § 1.148, which names it "Zizania aquatica, commonly known as wild rice or manomin". Under § 84.091 "the state is the owner of wild rice and other aquatic vegetation growing in public waters", and members of federally recognised tribes in Minnesota holding a valid tribal identification card "are deemed to have a license to harvest wild rice". The season, § 84.105, is a single sentence: "Ripe wild rice may be harvested from August 15 to September 30." How it may be taken has been fixed since 1949 by § 84.111 — no watercraft other than a boat, skiff or canoe propelled by hand, no more than 36 inches wide and 18 feet long, and no machine for gathering the grain "other than with flails not over 30 inches in length nor over one pound in weight, which flails must be held and operated by hand" — and it is unlawful to harvest between 3:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m. Densmore's two sticks of 24 inches in 1929 sit comfortably inside a legal limit written twenty years later. The labelling law, § 30.49, then forces the distinction onto the package: cultivated rice must be marked "paddy" or "cultivated"; lake rice may be marked "100 percent naturally grown, lake and river wild rice", and if it was taken by machine the words "machine harvested" must appear beside the product name; and subdivision 5 says flatly that "a wild rice label that implies the wild rice is harvested or processed by Indians is misbranded unless the package contains only 100 percent natural lake or river wild rice harvested by Indians." Minnesota did not legislate this out of tidiness. It legislated because paddy rice, bred and grown in flooded fields from the late 1960s, undercut the hand-harvested crop and took the income with it, and because § 84.10, still on the books from 1939, had already tried to reserve the rice of the named reservations to the people of those reservations. Buy the rice the label calls hand-harvested lake rice, pay what it costs, and know whose work you are eating.
Why this version works
Broth first, cream last. Jenks's nineteenth-century sources describe the grain thickening broth of venison, fish and fowl, not milk, and that order still gives the better soup: build flavour in stock, get the seasoning right while it is still a broth, and stir cream in at the end over low heat. Cream added early boils, flattens and can split against the acid of mushrooms and sherry.
The rice is cooked apart, and its water goes into the pot. Lake rice releases a dark, nutty, faintly smoky liquor as it cooks, and that liquor is most of the reason this soup tastes of anything. Boiled straight in the broth it would muddy the whole pot and thicken it unpredictably; cooked in four cups of plain water it gives you both a properly done grain and two cups of concentrated cooking liquid to pour back in.
The mushrooms are browned dry before anything wet touches them. A pound of mushrooms will give up most of a cup of water. Cooked in butter from the start they poach in it and stay pallid; put into a hot dry pan first, they squeak, release, dry out and then take colour, and that colour is the closest a kitchen without game stock can get to what the old descriptions meant by broth.
Hand-harvested rice and paddy rice are not interchangeable in the pan. Parched lake rice is mottled brown, thin-hulled and done in about 35 minutes, splitting along its length and curling open. Cultivated paddy rice is near-black, thicker and wants 50 minutes or more, and it holds its tube shape rather than butterflying. Cook either one by the clock written for the other and you get gluey shreds or bullets. The law that makes the label tell you which is which is also the cook's instruction.
