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Rice Sandwiches
Take an ounce each of ground rice, flour, butter, and castor sugar, a tea-spoonful of baking-powder and an egg. Beat all well together for five minutes, then spread thinly on to a well-buttered tin, and bake in a quick oven for five minutes. Turn out upon a sugared paper; spread half with strawberry jam, press the other half lightly on it, and cut into pieces as sandwiches. Arrange neatly, and scatter sugar over. Probable cost, 9d.
A tiny, fast tray bake built on equal weights — the Victorian pound-cake logic scaled down to ounces. The whole batch is about the size of a paperback, so read the yield note before you plan on it for a party.
- Quick ovenGenerally taken as somewhere around 400-450F (200-230C). With only five minutes' baking the oven and tin need to be fully preheated.
- Ground riceThis is rice flour, though the Victorian article was coarser than the fine white rice flour sold today — closer to a semolina grind. Either works; the coarser one gives the slight sandiness the recipe is after.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar, not confectioners'. Granulated will not dissolve in five minutes of beating and leaves the surface speckled.
- The weightsOne ounce is 28 g, so the batter totals roughly 4 oz of ingredients plus one egg. Thick enough to spread rather than pour, so work it out with a spatula.
- The five minutes of beatingThis is the hinge. There is no liquid beyond the egg, and all the lift comes from air worked into the butter and sugar plus the baking powder. Hand-beating for a full five minutes is what the original assumes; two to three minutes in a stand mixer does the same work.
- Baking powderA teaspoon to 2 oz of dry ingredients is heavy-handed by modern standards and can leave a metallic edge. Half a teaspoon is closer to current proportion for this quantity of flour.
- Tin and turning outUse a quarter-sheet pan or a Swiss roll tin, well buttered as the recipe says; spread the paste no more than 1/8 in thick. The sugared paper is what you turn the sheet out onto: paper dusted with caster sugar, which stops it sticking and sugars the outside.
- Assemble warmCut the sheet in half, jam one half while both are still warm and pliable, then press and cut. Cooled fully, the thin cake cracks rather than folds.
- YieldAbout eight small sandwich fingers — enough for two or three at tea. Double or triple it if you want a plateful.
This sits among the small tea-table confections that filled out an afternoon tray: cheap, quick, and made from things a well-stocked Victorian larder was likely to hold. Ground rice was a staple of nineteenth-century British baking, valued for puddings, biscuits and "rice cakes" because it gave a short, dry crumb and stretched more expensive wheat flour; it turns up frequently in books of this period where a modern cook would reach for cornflour. The equal-weight formula -- an ounce each of flour, rice, butter and sugar bound with one egg -- echoes the equal-weights logic of pound cake rather than descending from it, and the "sandwich" name refers only to the construction, jam pressed between two thin sheets, in the same sense as the Victoria sandwich. The "probable cost" in pence, a common feature of household cookery books of this kind, gave a household a figure to check the kitchen accounts against.