Rice Cakes
A pinch of salt Add 1 cup well cooked rice Use flour enough to make a batter and 2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder. Mix well in small cakes. Bake as for Bread Griddle Cakes. 2 eggs, well beaten 2 teaspoons salt 2 teacups rye meal
The text as printed has been scrambled by the typesetter: the ingredient list runs out of order and appears to have absorbed a line or two from a neighbouring rye recipe. What follows is a reading of what the cook was actually meant to do.
- The garbled listRead it as: 2 eggs well beaten, a pinch of salt, 1 cup well-cooked rice, flour enough to make a batter, 2 level teaspoons baking powder. The "2 teaspoons salt" and "2 teacups rye meal" almost certainly belong to the recipe set beside this one on the page; two teaspoons of salt in a cup of batter would be inedible.
- TeacupA teacup as a period measure is smaller than a modern cup, commonly reckoned at about three-quarters of one, though usage varied and this booklet does not define it. It is not relevant here if the rye line is discarded.
- Flour enough for a batterThe recipe gives no quantity and no liquid at all, which is another sign of a dropped line; eggs and rice alone will not pour. In practice something in the region of 3/4 to 1 cup of flour, slackened with milk to the consistency of thick cream, will answer.
- CalumetA double-acting phosphate baking powder, and this booklet exists to sell it. Any modern double-acting powder substitutes one for one, and 2 level teaspoons to a cup of flour is on the generous side but within normal range.
- Well cooked riceLeftover plain boiled rice, cooked soft rather than al dente. Cold rice straight from the refrigerator will clump; break it up with a fork into the beaten eggs before the flour goes in.
- Griddle heatThe recipe gives no temperature, only a cross-reference to Bread Griddle Cakes. A moderately hot, lightly greased griddle is what is meant; keep the cakes small and turn once when the surface bubbles set.
- YieldWith the quantities suggested above, perhaps a dozen small cakes, though the original specifies neither flour nor liquid and no firm yield can be recovered from it.
Reliable Recipes was the promotional cookbook of the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, given away and sold cheaply through the early decades of the twentieth century in edition after edition; the brand name recurs through the recipes, which is the whole point of the book. Rice cakes of this kind belong to the older tradition of griddle cakes built on yesterday's cooked grain — meal, buckwheat, hominy, oatmeal, rice — when a household cooked rice in quantity and expected the remainder to turn up at breakfast rather than be thrown out. The scrambled state of this particular entry may owe something to the conditions of the genre: these booklets were set quickly and cheaply, and lines here appear to have slipped between adjacent recipes.