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Rice Waffles
One and three-fourths cups of flour, two-thirds of a cup of cold boiled rice, one and one-fourth cups of milk, two tablespoons of sugar, one egg, two and one-half teaspoons of baking powder, one-fourth of a teaspoon of salt, one tablespoon of melted butter. Sift dry ingredients, work in rice, add milk, yolk of egg well beaten, and butter, then beaten white. Bake in waffle irons.
A straightforward leftover-rice waffle; the only real difficulty is that the original assumes a stovetop waffle iron and gives no cooking time.
- The hinge: break up the riceRub the cold boiled rice into the sifted dry ingredients with your fingertips until no clumps remain, exactly as you would cut fat into pastry flour. Lumps of packed rice will not disperse once the milk goes in and give you gummy pockets in the finished waffle.
- Rice quantityTwo-thirds of a cup of cooked long- or medium-grain rice, plain, drained and thoroughly cold, as the recipe specifies. Warm rice will begin to thicken the batter before the baking powder does its work.
- Waffle ironThe recipe says only 'bake in waffle irons'; it was most likely written for a hinged cast-iron iron set over a burner and turned by hand. In a modern electric iron use a medium-high setting and expect 4 to 5 minutes per waffle; the rice browns readily, so watch the first one and adjust.
- Baking powderTwo and a half teaspoons is workable for a modern double-acting powder with this much flour, though slightly generous by current proportions. Early commercial baking powders varied in strength, so if the finished waffle tastes faintly metallic, drop to two teaspoons next time.
- Folding the whiteBeat the single egg white to soft peaks and fold it in last, off the mixer, keeping the batter loose and airy. This is the entire leavening strategy beyond the powder and it collapses if you stir the batter down again while the iron heats.
- Batter consistencyIt should pour thickly, not run. Rice absorbs liquid as the batter stands, so add milk a tablespoon at a time if the second and third waffles are stiff.
- YieldAbout four to six waffles depending on iron size; serves three or four with butter and syrup. The batter does not keep well overnight because the rice continues to swell.
Rice waffles belong to a family of American breakfast breads built on cooked rice as a partial substitute for wheat flour, and they were especially at home in the rice-growing Carolinas and Georgia, where rice bread, rice muffins and rice cakes appear steadily in nineteenth-century cookbooks. Their appearance in a general household manual such as this one reflects a practical fact: a thrifty kitchen expected to find a use for the previous day's boiled rice rather than discard it. Chemical leavening was by then well established for quick breakfast breads, though yeast-raised waffles remained in print alongside baking-powder ones, and a cook could put waffles on the table in the time it took the iron to heat.