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Rice-Flour Bread
Take one pint of rice, and boil it soft; add a pint of cream, and then three quarts of rice-flour. Put the preparation to rise in a tin or earthen vessel till it has risen enough. Next divide it into three parts, and bake these like other bread into three large loaves; or, scald the flour, and when it is cold mix half wheat-flour or corn. This bread should be raised with leaven in the usual way. (See also RICE BREAD.)
A skeleton of a recipe, written for a cook who already knew how to keep leaven and judge a brick oven. Two things are missing entirely: any quantity of leaven and any oven temperature.
- Read the second half firstRice flour has no gluten, so a loaf built on three quarts of it will not hold gas and will bake dense and crumbling. The alternative given at the end — scald the flour, cool it, then mix in half wheat flour (the recipe allows corn in its place) — is the version worth making, and it is the wheat, not the corn, that makes it bread rather than a pudding.
- Volumes are largeA pint of raw rice yields roughly 6 cups cooked; three quarts of rice flour is on the order of 3 1/2 to 4 lb. The total is a household batch of three big loaves, not something to scale down casually.
- "Leaven in the usual way"This means a piece of fermented dough or a wet starter kept from the last baking, i.e. sourdough. The book gives no amount; figure 20-25 percent of the flour weight as active starter, and judge by the dough rather than the clock.
- "Risen enough"With a wet, rice-heavy dough this is slow, and slack dough gives no clean dome. Look for a dough that has grown by roughly half and holds a shallow dent when pressed, not one that has doubled — rice-flour doughs collapse readily once overproofed.
- Scalding the flourPouring boiling water over the rice flour gelatinises the starch, the same principle as a Japanese yudane or tangzhong. It absorbs a great deal of water and keeps the crumb moist, but it must be fully cold before it meets the leaven or the fermentation will be killed.
- OvenNo temperature is given because none could be. Bake at 425F for the first 15 minutes, then drop to 375F for a further 35-45 minutes for large loaves; internal temperature should reach 205-210F, as the wet rice crumb reads underdone by touch.
- CreamA pint of nineteenth-century cream was often closer to modern single or light cream than to heavy whipping cream, though gravity-separated cream varied a good deal. Whole milk with a splash of heavy cream is a reasonable stand-in.
- CoolingLet these loaves cool completely before cutting. Rice starch sets on cooling, and a warm cut face will smear and seem gummy even when fully baked.
Rice bread belongs to a long tradition of stretching wheat with whatever starch was cheaper or nearer to hand — potato, barley, oatmeal, boiled rice, and in America cornmeal, which this entry offers as an alternative in the same breath. The point being illustrated is economy: boiled rice and its flour absorb a great deal of water, so a loaf made with them yields more bread per pound of wheat and stays moist longer. In the rice-growing Carolina and Georgia low country the same idea produced the well-known rice breads and philpys of the region, and English cookery writers of the period recommended rice flour to bakers and households alike whenever wheat prices rose. The insistence on leaven "in the usual way" dates the recipe as much as anything: it assumes a kitchen where a piece of dough was held back from each baking rather than a packet of yeast bought as needed.