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Rice Waffles
Stir 1 cupful boiled rice into 1 pint of sweet milk; add 2 well-beaten eggs. Sift together 1 small cupful of flour, 1 teaspoonful each of salt and baking-powder, a tablespoonful of butter. Add gradually to the first mixture, stirring to-gether until you have a thin, light batter. The griddle cake to-day is another article of food which has taken high rank upon the American table. The properly made griddle cake is a delicious food, healthful, appetizing, and nutritious.
The batter must be thin, the cakes made small and not too thick,--about a good eighth of an inch thick when baked,--browned, and neatly turned. The griddle must be merely rubbed with grease, not grease-soaked. This is highly important. Take a thick piece of salt pork on a fork, or a lump of suet in a piece of cheese-cloth, and rub lightly over the hot griddle and pour the batter on immediately.
Remember that buckwheat is one of the most difficult flours to lighten. Where it enters into combination with other materials this fact must be recognized and a somewhat larger proportion of baking-powder allowed. Made in the manner directed in these recipes, buckwheat cakes can be safely and profusely eaten by every one.
A thin rice batter of the sort that was standard in late nineteenth-century waffle cookery, where cooked rice stretched a small amount of flour into a tender cake. The instructions stop short of the iron, so a few gaps need filling.
- The rice must be soft and coldUse plain boiled long-grain or medium-grain rice, cooked well past al dente and fully cooled. Cold rice stirs in more evenly, and firm grains can stay noticeably gritty, since little in the short cooking time softens them further.
- MeasurementsA pint is 2 cups of milk; "1 small cupful" of flour is best read as a scant cup, roughly 4 oz. "Sweet milk" simply means fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabber called for elsewhere in books of this period.
- The butter is misplacedButter is listed with the ingredients to be sifted, which is not possible. Melt the tablespoon and add it to the wet mixture with the eggs.
- Baking powder proportionOne teaspoon to a scant cup of flour is at the low end of the modern range, especially given how much milk and rice the flour has to lift, and period baking powders are generally reckoned to have been less reliable than today's double-acting kind. Mix the batter and cook it promptly rather than letting it stand.
- Cooking the wafflesCooking -- The directions on the page are for a griddle: small cakes, about a good eighth of an inch thick, on a lightly greased hot surface. If cooking the batter as waffles instead, heat the iron thoroughly, brush it lightly with fat, and cook until the steam slows and the outside is set and browned -- about 4 to 5 minutes in a standard electric iron. The batter is deliberately thin, so fill the iron a little less generously than you would with a stiff batter.
- GreasingThe advice to rub the surface rather than soak it holds for waffle irons as much as griddles. Excess fat pools in the wells and fries the batter into something leathery instead of crisping it.
- YieldAbout 6 to 8 waffles in a standard square iron, serving three or four. They are best eaten as they come off the iron; the rice keeps the interior moist but they soften quickly if stacked.