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Rice Waffles
Boil a quarter of a pint of rice in a very little water till it is tender. Drain it, and beat it well while hot with an ounce of butter. Add six ounces of flour, the well-beaten yolks of four eggs, and as much milk as will form a batter--a little less than a pint will be required. Beat the whites of the eggs till firm, and add them to the batter at the last moment. Be sure to beat all well together, and to make the batter lighter pour it backwards and forwards from a good height for a few minutes. Make the waffle-iron hot, rub dissolved butter over every part of it, and allow a large spoonful of the mixture for each of the cakes. Close the iron, and set it over a stove, or over hot coals, turn the iron over at the end of six or eight minutes, then open it, and if the cake is nicely coloured and leaves the iron easily it is done enough. When pouring in the batter be very careful to leave sufficient room in the iron for the batter to rise. Time to bake the waffles, about a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, for this quantity, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A Victorian stovetop waffle batter leavened entirely by beaten egg white, with boiled rice for tenderness. The whole thing hangs on the whites: fold them in and cook at once.
- The hingeThere is no baking powder here. The whites are the only lift, so fold them in with a light hand and start cooking immediately — a batter left standing while the iron heats will go flat and the waffles will be leathery.
- Rice measured by volumeA quarter of a pint of raw rice is about 5 fl oz in imperial terms, something between half and two-thirds of a cup, or roughly 4 oz by weight. Boiled tender and drained it will yield somewhere around 1 1/2 cups of cooked rice.
- Flour and milkSix ounces of flour is about 1 1/3 cups. "A little less than a pint" in an English book of this date means a little under 20 fl oz, so upwards of 2 cups of milk in US measure — start with 2 and hold the rest back, since the rice absorbs unpredictably and you want a thick pouring batter, not a pourable cream.
- Pouring from a heightThis is aeration of a sort, the same principle as pulling tea, and the instruction turns up in other cookery books of the period. If you have already beaten the whites in properly it adds little, and it risks knocking the air back out. Beat the base batter well before the whites go in and skip the theatrics.
- Waffle-iron timingSix to eight minutes a side applies to a cast-iron hinged iron heated over coals, where the metal cools every time you open it; the recipe allows about a quarter of an hour in all. An electric waffle iron at medium-high will do these in 3 to 5 minutes; the recipe's own test is colour and whether the cake leaves the iron easily.
- GreasingBrush melted butter over both plates before every waffle, not just the first. Egg-white batters with no sugar stick badly, and a non-stick iron still benefits here.
- Room to riseThe warning is real. A spoonful per cake sounds mean, but this batter expands hard on contact with heat and will force the hinge open.
- Yield"Sufficient for six or eight persons" is the book's own estimate; how many cakes that amounts to depends entirely on the size of the iron, and a modern deep-grid electric one will give fewer, larger waffles. Probable cost of 1s 3d is a period note, not a shopping guide.
Rice in a waffle or griddle batter was a familiar economy in the nineteenth century, and it does two useful things: it stretches wheat flour, which was the expensive ingredient, and its starch keeps the crumb moist inside a crisp shell. Waffles themselves came to English and American kitchens through the Low Countries, where the hinged iron with its deep grid was long established; rice versions are particularly associated with the American South, where Carolina rice was cheap and plentiful, though the recipe presents this simply as one variation among many griddle cakes. The instruction to set the iron "over a stove, or over hot coals" places the recipe firmly before electric irons, which did not appear in domestic kitchens until the twentieth century — the cook was expected to judge doneness by colour and release, and to reheat the iron between cakes.