Home › Biscuits and Muffins › Rice Muffins
Rice Muffins
1 cup flour 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon sugar 2/3 cup milk 1 egg 1 tablespoon shortening 1 cup cold boiled rice Sift together flour, baking powder, salt and sugar; add milk slowly, then well-beaten egg and melted shortening; add rice and mix well. Grease muffin tins; drop one spoonful of mixture into each. Bake 20 to 30 minutes in hot oven.
A leftover-rice muffin from a baking powder company pamphlet, with a batter thin enough to drop rather than scoop. A few points make it behave in a modern kitchen.
- Oven temperature"Hot oven" in this period generally means somewhere around 400 to 450F. The recipe's own 20 to 30 minute range allows for that variation.
- The rice matters mostThe recipe specifies cold boiled rice; separating the grains with a fork before they go in helps. Warm or sticky rice tends to clump in the batter.
- Baking powder quantityTwo teaspoons to one cup of flour is high by current practice, but correct here: the cup of rice is inert ballast that the flour alone cannot lift. Use a fresh tin, since old baking powder is the usual cause of flat results.
- ShorteningIn this period "shortening" could mean lard, a solid vegetable fat, or butter. Melted butter works and tastes better; melt it and let it cool slightly so it does not cook the egg.
- "One spoonful"The instruction is vague. Fill standard muffin cups about two-thirds full.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 standard muffins, or 6 in a large tin. Best eaten warm the day they are made, as the rice makes them go heavy once cold.
- Texture to expectThese are moist and slightly chewy rather than cakey, closer to a spoonbread than a bakery muffin. That is the intended result, not a fault.
The New Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, and in the manner often associated with manufacturer cookbooks of its era it exists to sell the product named in every ingredient list. Rice muffins belong to the older American tradition of stretching wheat flour with cooked grain — rice, hominy, cornmeal, oatmeal — which appears throughout nineteenth-century bread chapters and survived into the twentieth as a use for leftovers. Rice breads and muffins were particularly associated with the Carolina Low Country, where rice was the staple crop and cooks are often said to have worked cold boiled rice into batters and doughs, though by the time this book appeared the idea had spread well beyond the South as ordinary household thrift.