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Cereal Left-Overs: Calumet
1/2 teaspoonful salt, 1 3/4 cupfuls flour, 1/4 teaspoonful salt, 1/2 teaspoonful salt, 1/2 cupful flour, 1/2 teaspoonful salt, Rice Gems. 1 egg, 1 cupful milk, 1 tablespoonful melted butter, 1 cupful cold rice, 1 cupful flour, 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, teaspoonful salt.
Beat the eggs till light, add the milk and butter. Beat the rice with this until smooth, then sift in the salt, flour, and baking powder. Bake 3 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking twenty minutes in hot gem pans. powder, teaspoonful salt, 4 tablespoonfuls sugar, 1¾ cupfuls milk, 1 egg, 2 tablespoonfuls melted butter.
Sift together the dry ingredients; work in the rice with the tips of the fingers. Add the well-beaten egg, milk, and butter; beat well; cook on a griddle.
Rice with Date Sauce.
Take cold rice, put it in a double boiler with a little milk, and let steam till the milk is absorbed.
Sweeten to taste and add a dash of nutmeg. Press the rice into buttered cups. Turn out and serve hot, individually, with a lemon sauce in which cut dates have been stewed for a few minutes. This makes a nice dessert.
Rice Waffles. 1½ cupfuls flour, cupful cold rice, 1½ cupfuls milk, 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, teaspoonful salt, 1 tablespoonful melted butter, 1 egg.
Sift the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Work the rice with the Rice Bread. 2 eggs, 1 tablespoonful melted butter, 1 cupful cold rice, 1 cupful cornmeal, cupful flour, 1 teaspoonful Calumet baking powder, teaspoonful salt, 1½ cupfuls milk.
To the yolks of the eggs, beaten well, add the milk and butter, rice, corn, and flour. Whip thoroughly, add the salt and baking powder, and last the whites of the eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Pour into shallow pans; allow the batter to spread only an inch thick. Bake in a moderate oven for half an hour. Cut into squares when baked, and serve hot.
A cluster of uses for cold cooked rice, from a baking-powder company's pamphlet. The batters are all quick breads, so the working method matters more than exact proportions.
- Cold rice is the pointUse plain boiled or steamed long-grain rice, thoroughly chilled, so the grains stay separate. Warm or freshly cooked rice turns pasty when beaten into batter and the gems come out heavy.
- Break up the rice firstWhether beaten smooth with egg and milk or rubbed into flour with the fingertips, the rice must be dispersed before the leavening goes in. Lumps of rice in a gem batter steam rather than bake and leave wet pockets.
- Calumet baking powderA double-acting powder, still sold; in this period it was a combination powder using sodium aluminium sulphate along with phosphate, not a phosphate-only type. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes measure for measure; if yours is single-acting, get the pans into the oven at once.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin pan with rounded cups. Grease and preheat it in the oven, then fill the hot cups; a modern muffin tin works but gives a softer crust.
- "Hot" and "moderate" ovens"Moderate" oven -- The rice bread is baked in a moderate oven, conventionally taken as somewhere around 350-375F, for half an hour. The gem recipe gives no oven heat at all: it specifies hot gem pans, not a hot oven.
- Rice bread thicknessThe instruction to spread the batter only an inch deep is worth following. Much deeper and the centre is likely to lag behind the crust in a half-hour bake.
- Ambiguous quantitiesSeveral amounts here have lost their fractions -- the salt in each recipe and the rice in the waffles read as bare "cupful" or "teaspoonful." Take salt as about half a teaspoon per batch and judge the rice by eye against the flour.
- Date sauceSteam the rice only until the milk is absorbed, a few minutes, then pack it into the cups while hot so it holds shape when turned out. Stew the dates in the lemon sauce briefly -- long cooking collapses them into sludge.
Calumet Baking Powder, made in Chicago from the late 1880s, was one of the aggressive newcomers competing with the established cream-of-tartar makers for the American kitchen, and like its rivals it circulated recipe leaflets in which every leavened item named the brand by name. That commercial origin explains the shape of this page: a run of formulas whose real purpose is to move tins of powder, grafted onto the older and thriftier tradition of the left-over cookery chapter. Cold rice reappearing as gems, waffles, batter bread and a moulded pudding is standard nineteenth-century household economy, and rice bread bound with cornmeal has a long history in the American South, where rice was an important crop in the Carolina and Georgia lowcountry. The dessert with dates points at the period's growing supply of imported dried fruit, increasingly affordable by 1900, which could turn yesterday's rice into something a hostess could serve in individual moulds.