Cook it like this and you’ll never bury it in cream-of-mushroom again. Rinse a cup of real wild rice well. Simmer it in about three cups of good broth, uncovered, at a gentle bubble, for forty to forty-five minutes — and then start checking, because the whole game is stopping at the right moment. You’re done not when it’s soft but when most of the grains have “butterflied,” split open to show the pale inside, while still holding a distinct chew. Drain off any extra liquid immediately so it doesn’t keep cooking into mush. Toss the hot grains with butter, a handful of mushrooms you’ve browned hard, some toasted pecans or dried cranberries if you like, a little thyme, salt. Serve it as its own proud side. That’s it — and the reason I’m laying it out so carefully is that most people have only ever met this grain drowned, and it deserves an introduction to itself.
Because here’s the thing that took me embarrassingly long to understand: wild rice isn’t a rice, and it isn’t a supporting actor, and the casserole did it dirty for two generations.
Let’s start with what it actually is, because the respect begins there. Real wild rice — manoomin — is not rice at all; it’s the seed of an aquatic grass native to the lakes and rivers of this region, and it has been a staple and a sacred food of the Anishinaabe and other peoples here for a very, very long time, harvested from canoes, by hand, the way it still is. This is arguably the most genuinely local and most genuinely old food anywhere near my kitchen — older than the wheat, older than the cattle, older than the province by an order of magnitude. And what did the mid-century prairie table, mine included, mostly do with this ancient, place-defining, hand- gathered grain? Stirred it into a can of condensed soup with some chicken and baked it grey. I say that with more shame than snark. We took the oldest and most rooted thing on the land and treated it as texture in a casserole.
The casserole isn’t evil — it’s just a specific kind of disrespect, the kind that comes from not looking. It treats wild rice as interchangeable, a chewy filler, a way to bulk out a dish, its dark strange grains valued mainly for not being white rice. And in doing that it erases the actual thing: the smoky, nutty, almost tea-like flavour that a proper cook-and-stop reveals; the texture that’s supposed to pop, not surrender; the fact that this grain has a character strong and specific enough to be the centre of a plate rather than hidden in the middle of one. You drown it because you’ve decided in advance it needs help. It does not need help. It needs to be let alone — cooked with attention, stopped at the butterfly, dressed lightly, and then put on the table as itself, so that for once you can taste what was actually here all along.
So cook it plain and proud, and taste it before you do anything else to it, and I think you’ll feel the small correction I’m describing — the difference between using an ingredient and honouring one. Buy the real hand-harvested grain if you can find it, from the people whose food it has always been; it costs more than the cultivated paddy-grown stuff and the reason it costs more is the canoe and the hands and the thousands of years, and that’s a price worth paying with your eyes open. Then don’t hide it. Let the oldest food on the land be the thing you build the plate around, not the thing you disguise. It was never a filler. We just weren’t paying attention, and paying attention, it turns out, is most of what cooking respect actually is.