Home › Bread › Corn and Rice Cakes
Corn and Rice Cakes
2 cups white corn meal 1 cup boiled rice 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon Gold Medal flour 3 eggs 2 cups milk 2 tablespoons melted butter 3 teaspoons baking powder Mix the dry ingredients, add the milk slowly; beat in the rice, add the eggs well beaten, the melted butter, beat thoroughly. Bake in greased muffin pans for twenty minutes.
A cornmeal muffin batter loosened with cooked rice, from a flour-company book that nonetheless uses only a single tablespoon of flour. The original gives a baking time but no temperature, which is the main gap to fill.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was normal when ranges had no thermometers. Twenty minutes in a greased muffin pan points to a hot oven: 400-425F. Bake until the tops are set and lightly browned and a tester comes out clean.
- Boiled riceOne cup cooked rice, not raw; the recipe does not say how it was seasoned, so plain rice cooked in water is the safe reading. Cool it before use and fork it apart before adding so it disperses instead of settling in clumps.
- White corn mealModern fine or medium white cornmeal works; coarse grits-style meal will stay gritty in twenty minutes. Yellow meal bakes up fine but gives a different colour and, to some palates, a slightly sweeter flavour.
- The tablespoon of flourA house-brand gesture rather than a structural ingredient. It does very little here; the eggs and rice carry the crumb.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons is in the normal range for this volume of batter by modern proportions too, so leave it as written. Modern double-acting powder releases part of its lift in the oven rather than all at once in the bowl, but get the pans in promptly once mixed.
- Melted butterLet it cool a little before it goes in, and add it after the beaten eggs, as written, so it does not set them. Two tablespoons is about 1 oz.
- Consistency and pansThe batter is loose, closer to a thick pancake batter than a muffin dough, and it will pour. Fill greased cups about two-thirds full; a well-greased cast-iron muffin or corn-stick pan preheated in the oven gives the best crust.
- YieldRoughly 15 to 18 standard muffins from about five cups of batter; more if your pan cups are small. Best eaten warm; cornmeal breads of this kind stale quickly.
Bread made from cornmeal stretched with cooked rice belongs to the American South, and is often associated with the Carolina and Georgia lowcountry, where rice was the staple crop and cooks folded leftover boiled rice into batters for spoonbread, philpy, rice waffles and cakes like these, though rice-in-cornbread appears more widely. The rice adds moisture and tenderness. Its appearance in a Gold Medal promotional cookbook is a small commercial curiosity: Washburn-Crosby of Minneapolis sold hard spring-wheat flour, and books of this kind were published to put the brand name into as many recipes as possible, including ones where the flour is nearly beside the point.