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Rice Griddle Cakes
One bowl cooked rice, one bowl flour, one teaspoonful soda, two teaspoonfuls cream tarter, a little salt, and enough sweet milk to make it the right consistency. Sour milk can be used instead of sweet, but in that case use the soda without the cream tarter.
A thrifty leftover-rice pancake with no eggs and no set measurements. The only real skill is judging the batter and keeping the griddle steady.
- What a "bowl" meansThe original assumes a household bowl of no fixed size, used twice for equal parts rice and flour. Working with 1 cup cooked rice to 1 cup flour gives roughly a dozen 4-inch cakes; scale by keeping the two equal.
- Soda and cream of tartarTogether they are simply homemade baking powder, in the standard proportion of two parts cream of tartar to one of soda. Note that the pair here adds up to considerably more than two teaspoons of commercial baking powder, so any substitution must be scaled up accordingly. One teaspoon of soda is generous for a single cup of flour, so if the cakes taste soapy or turn yellow-brown, cut both in half next time.
- Sour milk versionThe substitution works because the acid in soured milk replaces the cream of tartar. Modern pasteurized milk spoils rather than souring cleanly; use buttermilk instead, and keep the soda at the stated teaspoon.
- ConsistencyAim for a batter that drops thickly from the spoon and spreads slowly, a little heavier than plain pancake batter. Mix and cook promptly, since chemical leavening loses lift on standing.
- The rice itselfCold, plainly boiled rice, well broken up with a fork so no clumps survive. Sticky short-grain leftovers work best; dry long-grain rice gives a gritty cake unless it is soaked briefly in the milk first.
- Griddle heatMedium, about 375F on an electric griddle, lightly greased. The batter has no sugar and no egg to help browning, so the cakes color slowly. Turn once, when the edges are set and bubbles have broken across the top.
- Salt"A little" in a leftover-rice batter means about half a teaspoon per cup of flour, more if the rice was cooked unsalted.
Rice griddle cakes belong to the large family of nineteenth-century breakfast breads built on the previous day's leftovers, alongside hominy cakes, bread-crumb griddle cakes and cold-potato pancakes. Rice was cheap, and it is often said to have been boiled as a supper starch and its remains turned into breakfast rather than wasted, though that pattern seems to have been far more a Southern and coastal one than a uniform national habit. The instruction to use soda alone with sour milk, or soda plus cream of tartar with sweet, is the signature of a period when commercial baking powder was available but many households still mixed their own leavening from the two tins on the shelf, and when milk soured reliably enough at home to be treated as an ingredient in its own right.