Steam cooking baskets, in popular use in Asia. The bamboo baskets are arranged one on top of the other over a pan of boiling water, allowing several different items to be cooked simultaneously.
Rice, a highly resilient cereal able to adapt to all climates, spread from China to India and arrived in Europe under Alexander the Great. Portuguese and Spanish explorers then brought rice to the New World, while slaves also introduced the African variety. Usually grown in flooded areas of land, called ‘paddy fields’, rice ranks alongside wheat as the most produced staple foodstuffs in the world today.