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Rice Cake
1 cup white sugar 1 cup rice flour 5 eggs 1 teaspoon flavoring.
Beat all together 20 minutes. Bake ½ hour in moderate oven. 2 eggs
A flourless sponge in all but name: sugar, rice flour and eggs, with nothing else to lift it. Everything depends on how much air you beat in.
- The hinge is the beatingThere is no baking powder, no butter and no liquid, so the eggs are the only leavening. Twenty minutes of hand beating translates to roughly 8-10 minutes in a stand mixer on high, until the mass is pale, thick and falls from the whisk in a ribbon that holds its shape for several seconds.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). Rice flour browns readily and the cake is sugar-heavy, so a hotter oven will set the crust before the centre rises. Half an hour is about right for a shallow pan; a deeper tube pan may want 40-45 minutes.
- Rice flour, not sweet rice flourUse finely milled white rice flour. Glutinous or "sweet" rice flour (mochiko) behaves completely differently and will give a dense, chewy result. Brown rice flour will work but tastes of it.
- The stray "2 eggs"The line at the end is a printing artefact, most likely the tail of an adjacent recipe or a leftover from a variant version. Make the cake with the five eggs called for and ignore it.
- FlavoringIn this period that means lemon extract, vanilla, almond extract or rosewater. One teaspoon of any of them is correct; lemon suits a rice cake best, since the crumb is bland and slightly sandy.
- Separating the eggsThe recipe says beat all together, which works, but the surer route is to whip whites to soft peaks separately, beat the yolks with the sugar until thick, then fold in the flour and whites. Same cake, less risk of a heavy layer at the bottom.
- Pan and yieldAn 8-inch tube pan or a 9-inch round. It makes a modest cake serving 8. Line the base but leave the sides ungreased if you want maximum rise; an ungreased wall gives the batter something to climb.
- Texture to expectRice flour has no gluten, so the crumb is fine, dry and a little granular rather than springy. It stales fast. Serve it the day it is baked, with fruit or cream.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to promote its flour, and the early twentieth-century editions circulated in enormous numbers through Canadian kitchens. That a rice flour cake sits in a flour miller's book says something about how ordinary rice flour once was on the pantry shelf: it was sold for puddings, for thickening, for dusting bread pans, and for exactly this kind of light, close-grained sponge. Cakes built on rice flour and a great many eggs are an older British and American tradition, appearing under names like rice cake, rice sponge and rice pound cake through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prized because the fine grain took a delicate crumb and because they kept their pale colour. The twenty-minute beating instruction is a reminder of how the recipe was originally worked: with a wooden spoon or a wire whisk and a strong arm, since the air you beat in was the only thing standing between the batter and a brick.