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Rice Muffins
2 1/4 cups flour 3/4 cup hot cooked rice 2 tablespoons melted butter 1 cup milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 5 teaspoons baking powder 2 tablespoon sugar Mix and sift the flour, baking powder, sugar and salt together. Add the milk to the dry ingredients. Mix thoroughly. Add the butter and fold in the rice; it will take a scant quarter of a cup of raw rice to make three-quarters of a cup of boiled rice. Turn into buttered gem pans, and bake in a quick oven twenty to thirty minutes.
A plain quick-bread muffin stretched with leftover rice — a wartime-era economy that also makes a moist, tender crumb. A few of the directions need translating.
- "Quick oven"Roughly 400-425°F in modern terms. At that heat muffins of this size are likely to be done nearer the twenty minutes than the thirty; start checking toward the end of that window and pull them when a skewer comes out clean.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a cast-iron muffin tin with rounded or oval cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; this batter fills about ten to twelve cups two-thirds full.
- Baking powderFive teaspoons to 2¼ cups flour is heavy by modern standards. With today's double-acting powder, 3½ to 4 teaspoons should give comparable lift; more than that can leave a metallic aftertaste.
- The riceFold it in warm and last, as directed, so the grains stay separate. Cold refrigerated rice clumps and will streak the batter with dense lumps. The stated conversion — a scant ¼ cup raw to ¾ cup cooked — is accurate for long-grain white rice.
- No eggThis is an eggless formula, and the cooked rice may well be doing some of the work of moisture and body that an egg would otherwise give. Do not thin the batter down; it should be thick and drop from the spoon rather than pour.
- MixingThe recipe says to mix thoroughly, but modern practice with a baking-powder batter is to combine only until the flour disappears. Overworking produces tunnels and a rubbery crumb, and this batter has enough starch already to turn gummy.
- FlourHousehold flour of this period may have been softer than today's all-purpose. If the batter seems stiff, an extra tablespoon or two of milk is warranted.
- Yield and servingTen to twelve muffins. Best eaten hot from the pan with butter; they stale quickly, as most eggless quick breads do.
American cookery had long folded leftover rice, hominy and cornmeal mush into breakfast breads through the nineteenth century, both to use up the previous day's pot and because the moist starch gave a softer crumb than flour alone. Wheat, fats and meat were all under conservation appeals during the First World War, and a rice muffin suits that kind of economy, though nothing in the recipe itself ties it to the war years, and the technique long predates them. "Gem" is a nineteenth-century American term for a small baking-powder muffin, and the heavy iron gem pans that produced them were a fixture of the period kitchen.