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Rice Fritters
One and a half cupfuls of cold boiled rice, two-thirds of a pint of fresh sweet milk, three eggs well beaten, and flour enough to make a rather stiff batter. Add a full teaspoonful of baking powder. Fry in boiling fat. Very nice with maple syrup and butter.
A leftover-rice batter fritter, thin enough to spoon but stiff enough to hold shape in the fat. The only vague quantity is the flour, and it is the one that decides whether these succeed.
- Two-thirds of a pintAn American pint is 16 fl oz, so this is about 1 1/3 cups of milk. "Fresh sweet milk" simply means ordinary unsoured whole milk, distinguished in older books from buttermilk or sour milk.
- Flour enoughExpect roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour. Aim for a batter that mounds on the spoon and drops off reluctantly; if it runs, the fritters spread and soak fat, and if it is stiff enough to stand in a peak the centres stay pasty.
- Boiling fatFat does not boil at frying heat; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously around the batter. In modern terms that is somewhere around 360-370F: much cooler and the fritters absorb grease, much hotter and the outside colours before the rice-heavy interior sets.
- The riceCold, fully cooked and on the dry side is what you want, which is why leftovers are specified. Rice still warm or wet will loosen the batter as it sits and you will end up adding flour to compensate.
- Baking powderA "full teaspoonful" is a level modern teaspoon or slightly more. Older baking powders were single-acting, releasing their gas on wetting rather than again in the heat, so mix and fry promptly rather than letting the batter stand.
- Yield and servingShould give something in the region of sixteen to twenty small fritters, enough for four. Drain on paper, keep them in a low oven while you fry the rest, and dress with maple syrup and butter as directed; whatever chapter it sits in, this eats as a breakfast or supper dish.
Rice fritters belong to the large family of nineteenth-century "made-over" dishes, in which yesterday's cooked starch was bound with egg and milk and fried rather than thrown out. Household manuals of the period treated leftover rice, hominy and cornmeal mush almost interchangeably for this purpose, and the same batter appears under names like rice cakes and rice puffs depending on how stiff it was made. Filing the recipe under Vegetables may reflect an older classification in which rice sat with the starchy accompaniments to a meal rather than in a dessert or breakfast chapter, even though the maple syrup and butter finish points squarely at the griddle-cake end of the table. Maple syrup as the sweetener rather than sugar or a fruit sauce is often said to be a Northern and New England habit in American cookbooks of this era.