Imagine, you are a mother living in China in the mid 1900s. Your family isn’t very wealthy, and you work in the fields every day with your husband to earn a living. Then, each night, you return home to cook a meal for your husband and son. It’s not a grand meal, but it is good and at least you have enough to make the meal filling. You have a little plot of land where you grow vegetables, and of course, there is always rice. You eat rice all the time, and it is such an important part of the diet. Filling, cheap, and it can be served in so many ways.
When I took this rice cooker to show the children, they had great trouble working out what it was. They are of course very familiar with rice, as for many of the children it frequently features in dinner, but they are used to seeing it cooked in a saucepan, in the microwave or in a specific, electric rice cooker. Their first guess on seeing this old rice cooker was that it was ‘something to do with fishing’, then they guessed it was part of a children’s game, a ball which ‘you put things inside so when you throw it, it makes noise’. The closest they came was guessing it was some sort of cooking utensil, but they had no idea what it could have been used for.
Rice, along with wheat, is one of the most important cereal crops in the world, providing a staple food for nearly half of the worlds population. Rice is part of the grass family and there are wild species of rice in many countries, including Australia but most of these varieties are not grown as food crops. In fact, only two species of rice are widely grown, African Oryza Glaberrima (grown and eaten almost exclusively in Africa) and Asian Oryza Sativa (grown and eaten all over the world). Today, there are other species of rice grown for food, including the rice which was eaten by the Native Americans, but they are grown on a very small scale compared to the two main species above. From these two species (though mainly the Asian species) come the most common varieties of rice which we eat. Traditionally, rice would be cooked on the stove or over the fire, but in the 1900s easier methods were created, including the electric rice cooker. Rice ball cookers, like the one I showed the children, may date back even further, and are similar, in the basic idea, to a tea ball. The raw rice is put inside, the ball is dropped into boiling water, the water rushes around and through the rice ball and in time the rice is cooked.
So, how far back does rice cultivation go? The rice we usually eat today, Asian rice, is probably native (in its original form) to India, but it was probably cultivated (grown as a food crop) in Asia first. Rice cultivation in India may date back as far as 2500BC, but is more likely to have begun between 2000 and 1500BC. Of course, that is still a very long time ago, but discoveries in China are much older. For many years, it was thought that rice cultivation in China dated to about 2800BC, almost 5000 years ago, but in 1973 and 1974 an archaeological dig led to discoveries which pushed the history of rice cultivation in Central and East China back over 2000 years! The archaeological dig at He-mu-du in the Zhejiang province discovered well preserved rice kernels (they were carbonized), bone spades, hoe blades and cooking utensils, all associated with the growing and eating of rice. Most excitingly, the finds were dated to 5005BC, about 7000 years ago! Other digs found evidence of rice husks in pottery and clay which may date back even further, to 6000BC or even 7000BC. If you would like to learn more about rice, click here.