Rice story(4)The Rest of the world

...For a long time in Britain,rice was regarded in the same way as the newly arrived spices.Expensive to buy,it was used by chefs to the aristocracy to make delicate sweets and desserts ,but was not considered a food for working people.Apart from rice pudding,its most famous appearance was in the savoury breakfast dish,kedgeree,developed in India during 19th -century colonnial rule.Based on the Indian dish kitchiri,kedgeree is a creamy mixture of smoked haddock,eggs and basmati rice,flavoured with nutmeg and often lightly curried.It gained great popularity in Victorian England and is now an established national favourite.Rice was introduced to the Americas by the conquering Spanish and Portuguese,and it has flourished ever since.Nowadays,rice is a hugely important crop in many south American countries,most notably Brazil,which grows as much rice as Japan yet still can not meet its own needs.Brazile is second only to Europe as the worlds largest importer of rice.Some scholars believe rice came to North America with the slaves ,who brought the seeds with them from West Africa.It was said that only they had the knowledge of how to grow rice.Another story talks of a ship from Madagascar that was blown off course and put into harbour in Charleston,South Carolina.As a gift of thanks,the captain presented the town with some "seeds of gold",which is a type of rice named for its colour.The reality is probably a combination of these legendary stories.The first Spanish colonists in Florida brought rice with them from the Old World,along with wheat and bread. While Florida proved a congenial environment for growing rice,it was South Carolina which became the main focus for rice cultivation.Attempts to grow upland rice in North Carolina had failed but Carolina Gold,grown in the freshwater island swamps of South Carolina,proved successful.By the late 17th century Carolina Gold was being produced in large quantities.South Carolina's rice fields were worked entirely by slaves,and it was this situation that contributed directly to the collapse of the rice industry in the Carolinas.When the slaves were freed after the American Civil War in the 1860s ,the rice fields were left empty.The war put an end to large scale rice cultivation in the Carolinas and Georgia,but it did continue along the mississippi River,in Louisiana,Arkansas and Texas.In the early 20th century rice cultivation spread to California,where rice is still a major crop today.The United States is now the world's second major rice exporter.