Rice Cakes
Put one pound of rice in soak the over-night. Boil very soft in the morning, drain the water from it and mix with it, while hot, a quarter of a pound of butter. After it has cooled, add to it one quart of milk, a little salt, and six eggs. Sift over it and stir into it gradually a half pound of flour. Beat the whole well and bake on a griddle like other batter cakes.--Mrs. W. Another Recipe for Rice Cakes.
One cup of cold boiled rice, rubbed in a quart of milk, one pint of flour, a teaspoonful of salt, two eggs beaten light. Beat all till free from lumps. Bake as soon as made, on a well greased griddle.
Two versions of the same thing: a griddle cake leavened by nothing but eggs and steam, one built from scratch and one from leftover rice. The first makes an enormous quantity.
- Yield, and halving itA pound of dry rice, a quart of milk and six eggs gives something like four quarts of batter — forty cakes or more. Halve or quarter the first recipe unless you are cooking for a crowd; the second version, built on one cup of cooked rice, makes a far smaller batch — a couple of dozen — and is the better weeknight choice.
- Weights in cupsA pound of rice is about 2 1/3 cups uncooked. A quarter pound of butter is half a cup, or one stick. Half a pound of flour is about 1 3/4 cups; the "pint of flour" in the second recipe is a volume measure, about 2 cups.
- Soaking is optional nowOvernight soaking probably reflected the coarser, sometimes older rice of the period, and it shortened cooking over an expensive fire. Modern long-grain rice boiled soft in plenty of water, well drained, does the same job in twenty minutes or so. The point is rice cooked past al dente until the grains slump.
- "Rubbed in a quart of milk"This is the hinge of the second recipe. Work the cold rice against the side of the bowl with the back of a spoon as you add milk so the grains break down and disperse. Whole grains left intact sink and the cakes cook unevenly.
- No leavening at allNeither recipe uses soda, saleratus or baking powder — the lift comes entirely from beaten eggs and steam, so these are dense and custardy rather than fluffy. Beating the whites separately and folding them in at the end is a period-appropriate way to lighten them if you want.
- Add butter to hot rice, milk to coldThe order given matters: butter goes in while the rice is hot so it melts and coats, but the milk and eggs wait until it has cooled, or the eggs curdle into threads.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 375F — a drop of water should skitter and vanish in a couple of seconds. Rice batter can catch and scorch more easily than plain wheat batter, and it needs a genuinely greased surface even on nonstick.
- Bake as soon as madeThe instruction in the second recipe is worth obeying in both. Rice starch keeps absorbing liquid, so a batter left to stand thickens into paste and the cakes turn heavy. Thin with a little milk if it has sat.
Rice cakes of this kind belong to a South where Carolina rice was cheap, plentiful and treated as a breakfast grain rather than a side dish. Nineteenth-century Southern cookbooks are full of ways to fold cooked rice into breads, waffles, muffins and griddle cakes \'s rice could not be wasted, and partly because rice stretched relatively expensive wheat flour. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, which is why the first recipe carries the initials "Mrs. W." while the second sits anonymously beneath it — though the reason for the difference is not recorded. The two may perhaps be read as a picture of period practice, one recipe for a planned company breakfast and one for the rice bowl in the pantry, but that is a modern gloss rather than anything the book says.