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Rice Muffins
1/4 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 cup boiled rice 1/2 cup milk. 1 egg Sift the dry ingredients; rub in the butter lightly; stir in the rice, then the beaten egg and milk. Pour into greased gem pans, filling them only half full, and bake in a moderate oven about twenty minutes.
A short quick-bread formula that uses up leftover rice. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so read the points below before you start.
- Missing flourThe instruction to "sift the dry ingredients" implies flour and salt that the printed list omits. Judging by the 2 teaspoons of baking powder, which by the usual period rule of 2 teaspoons to the cup suggests about 1 cup of flour, and by the small quantity of liquid, roughly 1 cup flour with a pinch of salt is the likeliest reconstruction.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "moderate" is conventionally taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Bake to the stated twenty minutes and judge by colour.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans came in various patterns, with cups generally smaller than a modern standard muffin cup. A regular 12-cup muffin tin works; the direction to fill only half full still applies.
- Boiled ricePlain white rice cooked in water, cooled and drained — not sweetened rice pudding. Cold leftover rice is ideal, but break up any clumps with a fork before it goes in or the muffins bake with dense pockets.
- Rubbing in the butterOne tablespoon is very little fat, so rub it into the flour thoroughly until no lumps remain. Softened, not melted; melted butter will not disperse through so dry a mixture.
- MixingThe recipe stirs the rice into the dry ingredients first, then the beaten egg and milk; stir only until moistened. A lumpy batter is correct here; beating it smooth makes the crumb tough and tunnelled.
- YieldA small batch, best eaten warm the day they are made.
- Section headingThe page appears under a heading unrelated to the dish, most likely a filing or binding accident rather than a clue to it. Loose-leaf cookbooks were designed to be rearranged by the owner.
Rice muffins belong to a large family of American quick breads built on cooked leftovers — rice, hominy, oatmeal, mashed potato, stale bread crumbs — that stretched wheat flour and put yesterday's kettle to use. They appear steadily in late nineteenth and early twentieth century household books, and are often associated with the South and with the rice-growing coast of the Carolinas and Georgia, where boiled rice was a daily staple rather than an occasional side. The reliance on baking powder rather than yeast places this version after commercial chemical leaveners had come into general use — they were on sale from the late 1850s and 1860s and spread unevenly thereafter — which is what made a hot bread possible between one meal and the next. The book's loose-leaf format, with each recipe on its own detachable page, invited the housewife to reorder and interleave her own additions, which may help explain the terseness of the text.