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Pancakes, Rice
Boil half a pound of rice to a jelly with a little water. When cold, mix with it a pint of cream, eight beaten eggs, and a little salt and nutmeg. Stir in half a pound of butter, just melted, and as much flour as will make a smooth batter. Fry in a very little lard or dripping.
A rich, custardy pancake batter thickened with cooked rice rather than relying on flour alone. The proportions are Victorian in scale and the flour is left to the cook's judgement, so a little translation helps.
- "Boil to a jelly" is the hingeThe rice must be cooked far past pilaf stage until the grains collapse and the mass sets like a thick congee. The recipe calls for only "a little water," so expect a long, slow simmer, stirred so it does not catch. Undercooked rice gives gritty pancakes that never bind.
- The pint is imperialIn a British book of this period a pint is 20 fl oz, so about 2½ US cups of cream. Half a pound of rice is 225 g, weighed raw.
- Flour is left open on purpose"As much flour as will make a smooth batter" is genuinely unspecified. Expect somewhere in the region of a cup, added a spoonful at a time until the batter falls from the ladle in a thick ribbon; the rice already provides most of the body.
- Half a pound of butter225 g of melted butter in a batter this size is very rich by modern standards and will make the pancakes brown fast and taste close to a fried custard. Halving it gives a lighter result without breaking the recipe.
- Cool the rice, then temperThe instruction to wait until cold matters — eight eggs stirred into hot rice will scramble. If the rice is merely warm, whisk a little of it into the eggs first.
- Lard or drippingBoth are still sold, and both suit this batter. Neutral oil or clarified butter works if you have neither.
- FryingMedium heat, not high. The eggs and dairy set slowly and a hot pan colours the outside before the centre is cooked; give each pancake two to three minutes a side and expect them thicker and softer than a crêpe.
- YieldThe full quantity makes a great deal of batter — around twenty pancakes of tea-plate size. Halving or quartering it is reasonable for a household of four.
- NutmegGrate it fresh. Pre-ground nutmeg has lost most of what the recipe is asking for, and it is the only spice here.
Rice pancakes belong to a large family of Georgian and Victorian dishes that stretch expensive wheat flour, or eggs and cream, with boiled grain — rice puddings, rice cheesecakes, rice fritters and ground-rice cakes all sit nearby in books of the period. Rice reached British kitchens by several routes, and by the later nineteenth century was cheap and ubiquitous, sold by the pound in every grocer's, which is why a cookery book of the period could assume a reader had half a pound to spare. The instruction to boil it "to a jelly" reflects a general preference of the age for rice cooked soft and starchy rather than in separate grains, the same treatment that produced the slow-baked rice pudding. The entry shows the standard Victorian batter logic: eggs and cream for richness, a starch for body, and just enough flour to hold it together.