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Rice Griddle-Cakes
Boil half a cup rice; when cold mix one quart sweet milk, the yolks of four eggs, and flour sufficient to make a stiff batter; beat the whites to a froth, stir in one tea-spoon soda, and two of cream tartar; add a little salt, and lastly the whites of eggs; bake on a griddle. A nice way to serve is to spread them while hot with butter, and almost any kind of preserves or jelly; roll them up neatly, cut off the ends, sprinkle them with sugar, and serve immediately. Mrs. Walter Mitchell, Gallipolis.
A large, plain batter cake leavened with soda and cream of tartar rather than yeast, despite its place in the yeast chapter. The quantities make a great deal of batter.
- Scale and yieldOne quart of milk plus four eggs and enough flour for a stiff batter yields roughly 30 to 36 cakes of about four inches. Halving the whole recipe is sensible for four people.
- "Sweet milk"Fresh unsoured whole milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabbered milk used elsewhere in the book. Ordinary whole milk is the direct equivalent.
- Flour, unmeasuredThe original leaves it open, and it has to: cold boiled rice varies in wetness. Expect somewhere around 3 to 4 cups of all-purpose flour for the full quart of milk, added gradually until the batter mounds on the spoon but still spreads on the griddle.
- The leaveningOne teaspoon soda to two of cream of tartar is the standard homemade proportion for improvising baking powder from its two components. It works, but it starts reacting the moment it is wet, so the cakes must go on the griddle promptly.
- Where to put the sodaStirring soda into beaten egg whites, as written, deflates them and distributes the leavening unevenly. Whisk the soda and cream of tartar into the flour instead, then fold the whites in last as the recipe otherwise directs.
- The riceHalf a cup of raw rice boiled soft gives roughly a cup and a half cooked. It must be cold, as the recipe specifies, or it will slacken the batter and gum the flour; cold leftover plain rice would serve as well.
- Griddle heatMedium and lightly greased; the original gives no temperature. These cakes are thicker and heavier than a plain flour pancake and need a moment longer per side; too hot a griddle browns the outside before the rice-laden center sets.
- ServingThe rolled presentation depends on the cakes being flexible, which means serving them straight off the griddle rather than holding a batch in a warm oven, where they stiffen and crack when rolled.
Rice appears constantly in nineteenth-century American griddle-cake and bread recipes as a way of stretching wheat flour and of using up cold cooked rice, which in a household that boiled rice as a plain side dish was a routine leftover. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing belongs to the decades when cooks could buy the two components separately and combine them at the bowl rather than rely on packaged baking powder. Buckeye Cookery was published in Minneapolis in 1877 as a compilation of contributed recipes. The rolled-and-sugared service, spread with jelly and trimmed at the ends, resembles a plain American cousin of the filled crepe, and the attribution to Mrs. Walter Mitchell of Gallipolis, Ohio, is typical of the book's method of crediting named contributors from Ohio towns.