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Southern Rice Bread
Put 2 cupfuls of boiled rice in a bowl, add 2 cupfuls of milk and the well-beaten yolks of 4 eggs. Sift in gradually 1 cupful of flour, add ½ of a teaspoonful of salt, 2 tablespoonfuls of butter melted, and the whites of the eggs whipped to a stiff froth. Turn into a shallow well-greased pan and bake for thirty minutes in a moderate oven.
A soft spoonbread-style batter rather than a kneaded loaf; it comes out of the oven closer to a savory pudding than to sandwich bread. The whipped whites are the only leavening, so how you fold them decides whether it rises.
- Moderate ovenA moderate oven is conventionally read as roughly 350-375F. Thirty minutes suits a batter about an inch deep in a pan of nine or ten inches; a deeper pan will want longer, and a tester should come out clean at the center.
- Fold, do not stirThere is no baking powder or soda here. Lighten the rice mixture with a spoonful of the whites first, then fold the rest in gently and get the pan into the oven immediately.
- The riceTwo cupfuls of boiled rice means plain cooked rice, cooled. Break up any clumps with a fork before adding the milk, or the finished bread will have dense pockets. Cooked rice left from an earlier meal would serve.
- CupfulsThe cupful of this period is close enough to our 8-ounce cup to use as written, though measures were not yet strictly standardized. The stray capital I in the printed text is a 1: one cupful of flour.
- MilkWhole milk gives the right richness. The batter should pour thickly, like a loose cornbread batter; if the rice was very dry, another few tablespoons of milk does no harm.
- Shallow and well greasedShallow is not incidental. This is a wet batter, and a deep pan risks a gummy middle. Butter the pan generously and serve from it.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight as a side. Cut in squares and eat hot with butter alongside a stew, greens or fried fish; it does not slice cleanly once cold, though leftovers reheat well covered.
Rice bread belongs to the Carolina and Georgia lowcountry, where rice was the staple crop and cooks stretched expensive wheat flour with whatever grain was at hand. It closely resembles spoonbread and batter bread, and this recipe sits squarely between the two: whipped whites, no yeast, eaten hot with a spoon or a fork. A cup of flour, a little leftover rice and four eggs make enough bread for a family table. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks carried whole families of such breads, and the practice of baking with cooked leftover rice is generally traced to those rice-growing regions rather than to any single author.