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Rice Waffles
Boil half a pint of rice and let it get cold, mix with it one-fourth pound butter and a little salt. Sift in it one and a half pints flour, beat five eggs separately, stir the yolks together with one quart milk, add whites beaten to a stiff froth, beat hard, and bake at once in waffle-iron. - Mrs. S. C. Lee, Baltimore, Md.
A yeast-free, soda-free waffle that rises on beaten egg white alone, which explains the instruction to bake at once. Everything else is a matter of translating volumes.
- The hinge: bake immediatelyEgg white is the only leavening here. Once the stiff whites go in, the foam begins to collapse and the rice weighs it down, so the iron must be hot and greased before you start mixing.
- Half a pint of riceOne cup, probably measured raw before boiling, which would give roughly 3 cups cooked, though the original does not make this explicit. Cook it soft in plenty of water, drain well, and cool it completely so it does not slacken the batter.
- Old measuresOne-fourth pound butter is 1/2 cup (1 stick); a pint and a half of flour is about 3 cups; a quart of milk is 4 cups. Sifting was usual in period recipes and still helps the flour disperse into a batter this wet.
- Batter consistencyFour cups of milk to three of flour gives a distinctly thin, pourable batter, thickened only by the rice. That is correct for a rice waffle; do not add flour to stiffen it.
- Beat five eggs separatelyYolks whisked into the milk, whites to a stiff froth and added last. Note that the original places "beat hard" after the whites go in; if you would rather not knock the air out, fold them instead.
- Melt or soften the butterA quarter pound of cold butter will not disperse into cold rice. Soften or gently melt it and work it through the rice before the flour goes in.
- The waffle ironThe original means a hinged cast-iron iron set over a stove and turned partway through. A modern electric iron works on a medium-high setting; expect a little longer than a standard batter, as the rice holds moisture.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 waffles from a standard round iron, enough for six to eight at breakfast. Serve straight from the iron with butter and syrup or molasses.
Rice appears often in nineteenth-century American breakfast breads, and frequently in recipes associated with the South and the port cities that traded with it, which fits this one being credited to a Baltimore contributor. Cooked rice, cornmeal, hominy and mashed potato were all used in similar ways, to extend wheat flour and to give a soft, moist crumb. Buckeye Cookery (1877, compiled in Ohio from contributions by women across the country) has a long "Breakfast and Tea Cakes" section reflecting a period when hot breads were expected at both ends of the day and the waffle iron was standard equipment. Beaten egg whites rather than chemical leavening were used in many of the richer batters of the era.