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Rice-Flour, or Ground Rice, to Make
Wash any quantity of rice in several waters, drain, and pound it whilst damp to powder in a mortar, dry it, and pass it through a fine sieve. Rice-flour thus made at home, though perhaps superior to that offered for sale, yet involves a good deal of labour and trouble in its preparation.
A method rather than a dish: rice reduced to powder for puddings, thickening and baking. The one point the original glosses over is that damp rice ground to a paste must be dried thoroughly before storage, or it will spoil within days.
- Skip the mortarA spice grinder, high-powered blender or clean coffee mill does the job far faster than pounding by hand. Work in small batches of about half a cup so the blades keep contact with the grain.
- Wet or dry grindingWashing and damp-pounding may help the grain break rather than fly about the mortar. Modern electric grinders generally handle dry rice better; if you grind dry, skip the washing and drying steps.
- Drying, if you do grind dampSpread the meal thinly on a tray in a very low oven, around 175-200F, and leave the door ajar until it feels bone dry and powdery, an hour or more. Damp rice meal moulds quickly and clogs the sieve.
- Ground rice is not rice flourGround rice is not quite rice flour -- In later British usage ground rice is generally the coarser product, closer to fine semolina, and is what gives old rice puddings their slight grittiness, while rice flour is sieved finer. This book's own title, however, treats the two as interchangeable; how finely you grind and sieve decides what you get.
- Which riceOrdinary long-grain or pudding rice gives a neutral flour suitable for puddings and shortbread. Glutinous rice produces a quite different, stretchy flour used in East Asian cooking, and will not substitute in Victorian recipes.
- SievingA fine-mesh sieve or drum sieve, and patience. Return the coarse tailings to the grinder rather than discarding them; two or three passes will convert nearly all of it.
- Yield and storageA cup of raw rice gives a little over a cup of flour. Keep it airtight and cool, and use it within a few months.
- Whether it is worth itThe original is candid about the labour involved, even while thinking the home-made article perhaps superior; bagged rice flour is now cheap and reliable. Grinding your own makes sense mainly when you want the coarser ground-rice texture, which is harder to buy outside Britain.
Ground rice earned its place in the Victorian storecupboard as a cheap, bland thickener at a time when rice was arriving in Britain in quantity from India, Carolina and later Burma. It stiffened blancmanges and moulds, padded out puddings and cheap cakes, and was rubbed into shortbread to give the short, sandy crumb still expected of it. Cassell's gives the method as an alphabetical dictionary entry, "Rice-Flour, or Ground Rice, to Make," because rice flour was treated as a raw material of the kitchen, on a level with breadcrumbs or clarified suet, and the compilers were writing for households that might still grind, pound and sift their own staples. The frank admission that the shop-bought article, though the home-made is "perhaps superior," saves "a good deal of labour and trouble" is characteristic of the book's late-century moment, when packaged groceries were steadily displacing kitchen work of exactly this kind.