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Rice-Flour Cakes
Take a pint of soft-boiled rice and half a pint of milk and water; add to this twelve spoonfuls of rice-flour. Divide the mixture into small cakes, and bake in a quick oven.
A three-ingredient formula from the instructional section of Cassell's, written for cooks who already knew what a rice cake should look like. The whole thing hinges on the consistency of the dough.
- Get the paste stiff enough to shape"Soft-boiled rice" means rice cooked well past al dente, until the grains collapse into a thick porridge. Add the rice flour gradually and stop when the mass holds a shape on the board; if it slumps, work in more flour rather than adding liquid.
- Pints are imperial hereCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so a pint of cooked rice is about 2 1/2 cups and the half pint of milk and water about 1 1/4 cups.
- "Twelve spoonfuls" is genuinely vagueVictorian recipes use "spoonful" for anything from a teaspoon to a serving spoon; twelve tablespoons is the likeliest reading, roughly 3/4 cup. Treat it as a starting point and judge by the dough, not the count.
- A quick oven is 425-450FA quick oven is roughly 400-425F -- period equivalences vary, and the book gives no temperature. High heat sets the outside before the wet rice paste can spread. Bake on a greased or parchment-lined sheet.
- Milk and waterThe phrase means the two mixed; the proportion is not given, and equal parts is a common assumption rather than a stated rule. Whole milk on its own works and gives a little more browning.
- No leavening, no fat, no saltAs written these are dense, plain and slightly chewy rather than cake-like. A good pinch of salt in the rice water is a period-appropriate improvement; a spoonful of sugar makes them palatable at tea.
- Rice flour is not rice starchUse plain white rice flour, ground rice or the finer Asian rice flour sold in bags. Glutinous (sweet) rice flour behaves quite differently and will give a sticky, stretchy result.
- Yield and servingExpect about a dozen cakes 2 to 3 inches across, baked 15-20 minutes until firm and lightly coloured underneath. They are best warm, split and buttered, and go hard within a day.
Rice flour earned a fixed place in Victorian British kitchens for reasons that had little to do with flavour: it was cheap, it kept well, and it was thought gentle on weak digestions, which is why ground rice and rice-flour cakes turn up so often in the invalid and nursery cookery of the period. Cheap rice reached British households in quantity from India and the American South through the nineteenth century, and by the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled it was a staple pantry item rather than a luxury. Cooks today come to this combination as one of the few nineteenth-century baked goods that happens to contain no wheat at all.