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Superior Rice Waffles
1 quart flour. 3 eggs. 1 cup boiled rice, beaten into the flour. 1 light teaspoonful soda.
Make into a batter with buttermilk. Bake quickly in waffle irons. Batter made as above and baked on a griddle makes excellent breakfast cakes.--Mrs. D. B. K.
A soda-and-buttermilk batter stretched with cooked rice, meant for a hinged cast-iron waffle iron set over coals or a stove eye. It scales down easily and the method carries over to a modern iron with almost no change.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in these books: a quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb 2 oz or 500 g of all-purpose flour. That makes a very large batch; halving or quartering the recipe is sensible for most households.
- The rice is the pointBeat the cooked rice into the dry flour before any liquid goes in, as written, so the grains are coated and separate. Rice added to wet batter clumps. Use plain boiled long-grain or medium-grain rice, cooled, and left-over rice is ideal.
- Soda and buttermilkA "light teaspoonful" means a level one, not heaped. The soda needs the acid in real cultured buttermilk to lift the batter; with modern sweet milk it will taste soapy and stay flat. Mix and cook promptly, since the lift begins the moment the two meet.
- ConsistencyNo quantity of buttermilk is given because it depended on the flour and the wetness of the rice. Add it gradually to a batter that pours thickly from the ladle and settles slowly, somewhat heavier than a plain pancake batter.
- No sugar, no fatThere is neither in the original, which is why these were breakfast bread rather than dessert. A tablespoon or two of melted butter makes release from a modern iron more reliable without changing the character.
- "Bake quickly"On a modern electric iron this means a high setting, and about 4 to 5 minutes per waffle; cast-iron stovetop irons want to be hot enough that a drop of water skitters, then turned once. Grease the plates well the first time even on non-stick, as rice batter tends to stick.
- The griddle variationCooked as pancakes, the same batter wants a medium-hot griddle and a longer turn than the waffle iron gives; the rice slows the interior cooking, so wait for the surface bubbles to set before flipping.
Rice appears constantly in nineteenth-century Virginia and Carolina breakfast breads, a reflection of the Lowcountry rice trade that made the grain cheap and familiar along the southern seaboard well before it became a national pantry staple. Cooks used it the way they used cold hominy or mashed potato: to soften a batter, stretch expensive wheat flour, and put yesterday's pot of rice to work. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from named and initialed Virginia housekeepers, which is why this one carries the signature "Mrs. D. B. K." rather than any standardized method. The near-total absence of measurement for the buttermilk is typical of the genre: these were notes exchanged between women who already knew what a waffle batter should look like.