Pick your rice clean, and wash it in two cold waters, not draining off the last water till you are ready to put the rice on the fire. Prepare a sauce-pan of water with a little salt in it, and when it boils, sprinkle in the rice. Boil it hard twenty minutes, keeping it covered. Then take it from the fire, and pour off the water. Afterwards set the sauce-pan in the chimney corner with the lid off, while you are dishing your dinner, to allow the rice to dry, and the grains to separate.
Rice, if properly boiled, should be soft and white, and every grain ought to stand alone. If badly managed, it will, when brought to table, be a grayish watery mass.
In most southern families, rice is boiled every day for the dinner table, and eaten with the meat and poultry.
The above is a Carolina receipt.
TO DRESS LETTUCE AS SALAD.
Strip off the outer leaves, wash the lettuce, split it in half, and lay it in cold water till dinner time. Then drain it and put it into a salad dish. Have ready two eggs boiled hard, (which they will be in ten minutes,) and laid in a basin of cold water for five minutes to prevent the whites from turning blue. Cut them in half and lay them on the lettuce.
Put the yolks of the eggs on a large plate, and with a wooden spoon mash them smooth, mixing with them a table-spoonful of water, and two table-spoonfuls of sweet oil. Then add, by degrees, a salt-spoonful of salt, a tea-spoonful of mustard, and a tea-spoonful of powdered loaf-sugar. When these are all smoothly united, add very gradually three table-spoonfuls of vinegar. The lettuce having been cut up fine on another plate, put it to the dressing, and mix it well.
If you have the dressing for salad made before dinner, put it into the bottom of the salad dish; then (having cut it up) lay the salad upon it, and let it rest till it is to be eaten, as stirring it will injure it.
You may decorate the top of the salad with slices of red beet, and with the hard white of the eggs cut into rings.