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Rice and Corn Muffins
1 cup corn meal 1 cup cold cooked rice 1 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons baking powder 1/4 cup milk 1 egg 2 tablespoons melted butter Mix corn meal, salt and baking powder; add rice and work with fingers until well blended. Add egg well beaten, milk and butter. Beat well. Pour into hot buttered gem pans, and bake one half hour. cup corn meal ½ cup flour 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup sour cream
A thrift muffin built on yesterday's cooked rice, from a book that gives no oven temperature and expects a cast-iron gem pan. A few things need pinning down before you start.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperature at all. A moderately hot oven, around 400F, is the usual modern equivalent for gem pans; judge by colour rather than trusting the half hour, and expect less time in a shallow modern tin.
- Gem pansThese were heavy cast-iron muffin pans with deep, rounded cups. The instruction to have them hot and buttered is the hinge of the recipe: the batter hits the greased iron and sets a crisp shell immediately. Preheat the pan in the oven, then butter it and fill it fast.
- The liquid looks shortA quarter cup of milk against a cup of cornmeal and a cup of rice gives a very stiff, spoonable mass rather than a pourable batter, and the recipe says "pour." Either the original read 1 1/4 cups, or the cold rice was expected to be quite wet. Add milk until the mixture just drops from the spoon.
- Working the rice inThe recipe has you rub the cold rice into the dry cornmeal with the fingers, which breaks up clumps of grains more easily than a spoon does.
- CornmealFine or medium meal works best here; a coarse stone-ground polenta grind may stay gritty in half an hour with this little liquid.
- RicePlain boiled long-grain or medium-grain, thoroughly cold as the recipe specifies. Warm rice will slacken the mixture.
- YieldRoughly 8 to 10 gems, depending on the size of the cups; the mixture comes to about two and a half cups. Best split and buttered warm from the pan.
- The stray lines at the endThe cornmeal, flour, sugar and sour cream listed after the instructions belong to the next recipe in the book and were caught in transcription. They are not part of these muffins.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that published a full general cookbook as advertising rather than a pamphlet of candy recipes. Breads of this kind cold cooked rice worked into cornmeal belong to a long American habit of stretching meal with leftover grain, and rice breads are most strongly associated with the Carolina Lowcountry, where rice was the staple crop and rice flour and boiled rice both went into breads and batter cakes. By the early twentieth century such recipes were appearing in general cookbooks as plain economy fare: the rice adds moisture and body without flour. The gem pan the recipe assumes was standard equipment in an American kitchen of the period, sold in cast iron in a dozen shapes.