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RICE JELLY
Mix one heaping table-spoon of rice-flour with cold water until it is a smooth paste, add a scant pint of boiling water, sweeten with loaf-sugar; boil until quite clear. If the jelly is intended for a patient with summer complaint, stir with a stick of cinnamon; if for one with fever, flavor with lemon juice, and mold. Rice-water is made in the same manner, by using twice the quantity of boiling water.
A plain invalid-cookery gruel that sets to a soft jelly as it cools. It works exactly as written, provided the starch is fully cooked out.
- Rice flour, not riceRice-flour is finely milled raw white rice, sold today as rice flour in most supermarkets and in every Asian grocery. Do not substitute glutinous (sweet) rice flour, which sets sticky rather than clear, and do not use ground cooked rice.
- Scant pintA scant pint is just under two cups, roughly 450 ml. One heaping tablespoon of rice flour to that much liquid gives a very soft set — closer to a thick drink than a firm jelly, which is the point for a sick-room.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a cone and broken off in lumps. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent; a tablespoon or two is enough.
- Boil until quite clearThis is the hinge. Raw starch tastes chalky and will not set properly; the mixture turns from milky to translucent when the granules have gelatinised. Expect five to ten minutes at a bare simmer with constant stirring, since rice starch catches on the bottom readily.
- Make the paste firstSlaking the flour with cold water before the boiling water goes in is what prevents lumps. Add the boiling water in a thin stream while whisking.
- FlavouringA cinnamon stick used as a stirrer gives only a faint infusion; leave it in the pan while the jelly cooks for any real flavour. Add lemon juice off the heat, as acid thins cooked starch if it boils with it.
- Moulding and yieldRinse the mould with cold water before filling so the jelly turns out. This makes two small servings, or one invalid's portion over a day; it will not keep more than a day or two refrigerated.
- Rice-waterDoubling the water gives a thin, barely thickened drink meant to be sipped rather than spooned — served warm or cold, sometimes with a little salt instead of sugar.
Rice jelly belongs to the nineteenth-century category of "food for the sick," a fixed section in nearly every American household manual of the period. Before intravenous fluids or commercial rehydration solutions, nursing a fever or a bowel complaint at home meant a graded ladder of bland, starchy, easily swallowed preparations: barley water, arrowroot, gruel, beef tea, and rice jelly among them. The two flavourings here follow the humoral logic still lingering in domestic medicine — cinnamon, regarded as warming and binding, for "summer complaint" (the seasonal diarrhoea that killed enormous numbers of infants in hot months), and cooling lemon for fever. Buckeye Cookery grew out of the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, compiled in Marysville, Ohio, in 1876 from recipes contributed by local churchwomen, and was reissued repeatedly under the Buckeye Cookery title from 1877; its sick-room chapter reflects what a household was expected to manage without a doctor. The remedy is largely useless as medicine, but as a source of water, sugar and a little starch for someone who could keep nothing else down, it was not nothing.