Home › Bread-Making › Corn and Rice Bread
Corn and Rice Bread
Take one pint of well-boiled rice, one pint of cornmeal, one ounce of butter, two eggs, one pint of sweet milk, two teaspoonfuls of baking powder. Beat the eggs very light, then add the milk and melted butter, beat the rice until perfectly smooth, and add to the eggs and milk. Lastly add the cornmeal. Beat all together until very light.
A rice-and-cornmeal batter bread of the Southern spoonbread family. The original gives no pan, oven or time at all, and it forgets to tell you where the baking powder goes, so both need supplying.
- Where the baking powder goesWhisk it into the cornmeal before that goes into the batter. Added on its own to a wet mixture it tends to clump and can leave bitter pockets.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the buttermilk or clabber also used in period kitchens. No substitution needed.
- Pint of riceA pint by volume of rice already cooked, not raw — roughly two cups, from about two-thirds of a cup of dry long or medium grain. It should be soft enough to mash smooth with a fork or beat down with a spoon; firm, separate grains will stay lumpy in the batter.
- CornmealPlain fine or medium stone-ground meal, white or yellow. Self-rising meal would double the leavening already called for.
- Baking and panThe original gives no direction at all; on modern equipment a greased iron skillet, shallow baking dish or loaf pan in a moderately hot oven, roughly 375-400F, for about 30 to 40 minutes, until set and browned. A deeper dish runs longer and stays softer in the middle.
- ConsistencyThis is a batter, not a dough — it pours. If the rice is very dry it can stiffen; a splash more milk brings it back. Do not add flour.
- Texture and servingThe rice keeps it moist and slightly custardy near the centre, closer to spoonbread than to a crisp cornbread. Serve hot from the dish with butter; it firms and dries noticeably once cold.
- YieldRoughly eight servings from a 9- or 10-inch pan, though the original states no yield.
Rice bread belongs to the Lowcountry and the wider rice-growing South, where cooked rice went into breads, griddle cakes and puddings as a matter of course, and where combining it with cornmeal stretched both. Recipes of this kind — rice bread, or rice spoonbread — appear across nineteenth-century American cookbooks. The baking powder is the modern touch: earlier versions of the same idea relied on beaten eggs alone, or on saleratus with sour milk, and commercial chemical leavening only became a kitchen staple in the second half of the 1800s. The recipe's silence on oven and time is said to be typical of the period, when a cook was traditionally expected to judge her own range and reached for the printed page mainly for proportions.