Dangerous puffed rice and more

A recent segment of television news showed people at Sam’s in Atlanta buying bags upon bags of rice — it used to be called hoarding. Last week an article in the Wall Street Journal also talked about the shortage of rice, in part due to poor harvest in Thailand and Cambodia. Some say that there may also be a shortage of rice due to famine conditions in certain countries in Africa and in Haiti. The price of a pound of rice has increased 140 percent since the first of the year.
Rice is the staple food for six out of every 10 people in the world. Asians have become so accustomed to rice with their meals that, regardless of how much they eat of other foods, some claim they feel hungry if they have not had rice.
The origins of rice are little known. According to food historians irrigated rice cultivation came relatively late to India, China and Southeast Asia. For centuries the easy growing of tubers, such as taro and yams, provided adequate nourishment for the people, with only one-third of the labor required by rice.
Little interest, at first
It took many centuries for Europeans, other than Spaniards, to be interested in rice. During the Middle Ages rice would arrive in England on spice ships from the Orient and then be stored in the locked spice-cupboards of British mansions. Rice was precious and used primarily as an ingredient in puddings along with sugar and powdered spice.
When Vasco da Gama returned from India in 1491, he presented the spices and other food discoveries to the King of Portugal, among which was rice. This discovery created an interest in rice cultivation in that country. From Portugal rice spread to the Piedmont region of Italy, where rice had been grown on a small scale since the 10th century. Intensive rice farming began in the Po Valley in 1522 with the aid of water diverted from mountain streams and the building of a complex canal system.
The consequences of rice on Italian cuisine were immense. Excellent fish and frogs were raised in rice irrigation waters. Frogs, skinned, dipped in flour, and fried in olive oil became a famous Italian delicacy.
Born in water
Italian rice is round, with an opaque, pearly middle. It is slightly sticky and usually served with a binding of sauce and cheese. “Rice,” the Italians says, “is born in water and dies in wine.”
Over the years rice, along with its starches, has been the subject of much research. In the 1890s a group of German physicists discovered, through the use of a microscope, a method of making starch. They heated rice in a test tube until the grains expanded. Publication of these experiments attracted the attention of Alexander P. Anderson, an American biochemist.
  Anderson was looking for ways of increasing the
digestibility of starch. He traveled to Munich to see the new technique. His German colleagues warned him not to seal the end of the test tube during the heating process or the steam pressure would explode it.
While still in Munich, Anderson tried the technique of heating rice in a test tube. Fortunately, as it turned out, he neglected the warning not to seal the test tube. The tube shattered, spraying glass all over the laboratory, but out came puffed rice more than eight times the size of a raw grain of rice.
After returning to America, Anderson began years of dangerous rice experiments. In 1902 workers refused to go near his workshop after a huge blast severely damaged the floor. He eventually tried stuffing his rice into an old cannon left over from the Spanish-American War, and a modern cereal was born.
The public first got a view of Quaker Puffed Rice at the World’s Fair of 1904, when eight bronze cannons exploded rice over the heads of a huge crowd. Today, puffed rice and puffed wheat are still exploded in a machine that is essentially a gun from which puffed grain erupts with a roar.
In the early days, puffed rice was coated in caramel and sold like popcorn. It was a long time before the product was marketed as a breakfast cereal with the slogan “Shot from Guns.”
There was a picture in the publicity material of professor A.P. Anderson, whose craggy professional face, broad forehead and octagon-shaped rimless glasses, turned out to be an ad-man’s dream.
The combination of science and the spectacular was one of the great winners in advertising history. At the New York World’s Fair in 1965 a man-and-wife circus team had themselves shot out of a cannon four times daily to provide publicity for Puffed Rice and its brother product, Puffed Wheat.
The American brewing industry increasingly uses rice and corn instead of malted barely for making beer, especially since “light” beer is being promoted heavily. Rice and corn are much cheaper and easier to mechanize than barely malt. They also give beer the bland taste and the pale color that suggests lightness.
Rice wine, some form of which is drunk wherever rice is grown, in Japan is called sake. There, sake is called the sacramental wine of the Shinto religion. Traditional weddings in Japan are celebrated according to Shinto rites, where the exchange and drinking of cups of sake seal the marriage contract.
Many Japanese occasions require the drinking of sake, from the Dolls’ Festival every March 3 to the solemn Viewing of the Full Moon in autumn. At the latter, pale gold sake and moon-shaped white dumplings are served.
Allan and I enjoy warm sake, served in tiny little cups, to accompany the traditional Japanese sukiyaki meal. It’s a fun way to entertain guests.