If anything in the kitchen proves the rule that the simplest things are often the most difficult, it is cooking a pot of white rice. (If you use a rice cooker, you don’t need this column; go away.) If it weren’t such a bugaboo, why have there been so many recipes and methods over the years, from experts and home cooks both, for how to cook that one simple dish? Like many Indian cooks, James Beard cooks a scant couple cups of rice in quarts of rolling, boiling water, open-topped, as the pasta is cooked.