Rice Muffins
1 1/2 cups prepared rice. 1 cup milk. 1/2 tablespoon butter. 3/4 cup flour. 1 teaspoon baking powder.
Brush muffin rings with crisco and cook till brown.
A wheat-stretching muffin from the years when flour was worth economizing. The instructions are compressed almost to the point of shorthand, so a few things have to be filled in.
- "Prepared rice"This means plain cooked rice, cooled — roughly 1/2 cup raw white rice boiled and drained. Leftover rice serves perfectly well, and slightly dry rice is easier to break up into the batter.
- The batter is mostly riceWith only 3/4 cup flour to 1 1/2 cups rice, this is closer to a bound rice cake than a conventional muffin. Expect a moist, dense, somewhat custardy crumb rather than a domed, springy one. Mash or break up any clumps of rice so the grains distribute evenly.
- Salt and eggSalt -- Not listed, and in a book that gives only proportions it was probably taken for granted; a scant 1/2 teaspoon is needed for the batter to taste of anything. The recipe calls for no egg, but adding one will give the low-gluten batter more structure if you want it.
- "Muffin rings"Rings are metal bands set on a greased griddle or a baking sheet, used because the batter is too loose to stand on its own. An ordinary muffin tin does the same job; grease it well, as this batter sticks.
- CriscoThe recipe names the brand outright; hydrogenated vegetable shortening had been on the market since 1911 and was still a relatively new product. Any neutral fat, or a pan spray, will do the same job.
- "Cook till brown"No temperature or time is given. In an oven, 400-425F for 20-25 minutes browns them through; on a griddle in rings, moderate heat and a turn once the underside sets. Test the center — the high proportion of moist rice means they can brown well before they are cooked through.
- YieldRoughly 8 to 12 standard muffins, depending how full the rings or cups are filled. Best warm; the rice tends to firm up once cold.
Mary A. Wilson's New Cook Book came out of her years writing wartime household columns, when substituting rice, cornmeal, oats or potato for part of the wheat flour was a patriotic instruction as much as a culinary one — American wheat was being shipped to Europe, and "wheatless" baking filled the newspapers. Rice muffins and rice breads long predate that campaign, being standard in the rice-growing Carolina and Georgia lowcountry, where cooked rice went into breads, waffles and griddle cakes as a matter of course. What the extreme brevity of this entry shows is the assumption behind the whole book: a reader who already knows what a muffin ring is, that batter wants salt, and roughly how hot a muffin oven should be, and who needs only the proportions.