Wild rice

Wild rice is not true rice at all but the long, slender, glossy black-brown seed of Zizania, a tall aquatic grass native to the lakes and slow rivers of North America. Hand-gathered for thousands of years by Ojibwe and other Great Lakes peoples — who know it as manoomin, the good berry — it cooks into firm, chewy grains that split to reveal a pale interior, tasting nutty, earthy and faintly tea-like, far more assertive and savoury than ordinary white rice.