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Southern Rice Bread
⅔ pint boiled rice 3 eggs 1 tablespoon butter and lard (mixed) 2 cups white corn meal 1 teaspoon baking powder Sweet milk to make thin batter.
Bake in earthen pans or muffin rings. -Mrs. A. W. Fraser, Iron Springs, Alta.
A rice-and-cornmeal batter bread of the Carolina-Georgia type, sent in from Alberta. The original gives no oven temperature and no timing, so both have to be supplied.
- ⅔ pint boiled riceAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so ⅔ pint is about 13 fl oz, or roughly 1⅔ cups of cooked rice (around 10 oz). Cook it soft and let it cool to lukewarm before mixing, or the eggs will begin to set.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabbered milk that older recipes call for by name. Whole milk is the right choice here; the recipe has only one tablespoon of fat in it.
- "Thin batter"This is the hinge. The batter should pour like heavy cream, not drop like muffin batter — expect somewhere around 1½ to 2 cups of milk depending on how wet the rice is. Too stiff and you get a dense corn muffin instead of the moist, custardy interior the dish is after.
- White corn mealFine white cornmeal, not the coarse yellow stuff and not corn flour or masa. If only yellow is available it works, but the crumb will be sandier and the flavour more assertive.
- LeaveningOne teaspoon of baking powder for two cups of meal is light by modern standards; the three eggs are doing most of the lifting. Beating the whites separately and folding them in gives a noticeably better rise, a treatment some spoonbread recipes call for.
- OvenNone is given. Bake at 425F in greased muffin rings for 20-25 minutes, or 400F for 35-40 minutes in a shallow earthenware or cast-iron dish, until set in the centre and browned at the edges.
- Earthen pansA heavy pottery or cast-iron vessel, preheated with a little fat in it, gives the crisp bottom crust that a thin aluminium tin will not. Grease muffin rings well; this batter is sticky.
- Yield and servingAbout a dozen muffin-sized breads, or one 8-inch pan. Serve hot from the oven with butter alongside meat or soup — it collapses and turns pasty as it cools, and does not reheat well.
Rice bread belongs to the Lowcountry rice districts of South Carolina and Georgia, where cooked rice was folded into cornmeal batter to stretch the meal and soften the crumb; the same idea produces philpy and the various batter breads and spoonbreads of that region. What makes this version interesting is where it was sent from — Iron Springs, Alberta, a prairie settlement — into a milling company's cookbook printed in Montreal. The Five Roses Cook Book was assembled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company from recipes contributed by Canadian housewives, and its pages are full of dishes that travelled with the people who cooked them. The "Southern" in the title marks the recipe as an import rather than a local habit: cornmeal breads were never central to Canadian baking the way wheat was.