Rice Muffins
2 1/2 cups flour. 1 cup boiled rice. 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup of milk 1 egg, well beaten 1/4 cup of melted butter 21/2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder Sift together thoroughly flour, baking powder and salt. Add rice, working it with tips of the fingers, and gradually milk, egg and butter. Bake in gem pans.
A plain baking-powder muffin extended with cooked rice, from a booklet published to sell Calumet baking powder. Two quantities have dropped out of the ingredient list as printed, so read the method before you start.
- Missing quantitiesThe list gives no amount of flour and no amount of rice, though both appear in the method. Comparable muffin recipes of the period use about 2 cups of flour to 1 cup of milk; the rice is cooked rice, usually around a cup. Neither figure is recoverable from this page, so treat them as your own judgement rather than the book's.
- Rice means cooked riceIt should be cold, well-drained boiled rice, not raw grain. Rubbing it through the dry flour with the fingertips separates the clumps so the grains disperse instead of forming a wet pocket in the crumb.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin pan, its cups usually a little smaller than a modern muffin cup. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; grease it well and heat it briefly before filling if you want the crisp edge cast iron gives.
- Oven temperatureThe book assumes you know your own oven. Muffins of this type bake at 400-425F for 20-25 minutes, until the tops spring back and a tester comes out clean.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was a double-acting powder, so any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes directly. Level the spoon rather than heaping it; too much baking powder leaves a chemical aftertaste.
- MixingAdd the liquids gradually as directed but stop as soon as the flour is damp. A lumpy batter bakes tender; a smooth one bakes tough and tunnelled.
- YieldRoughly a dozen muffins, depending on the flour quantity you settle on. Best eaten fresh.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets that baking powder companies distributed in the early twentieth century. Rice muffins belong to a large family of American quick breads that stretched wheat flour with whatever cooked starch was in the pantry the morning after dinner: hominy, mashed potato, oatmeal, cornmeal mush, or boiled rice. The habit was thrift as much as taste, though the rice does give a distinctly moist, slightly chewy crumb that flour alone will not. Rice appears especially often in Southern and Charleston-influenced cookbooks, where rice was the everyday grain and leftover breakfast rice was a standing ingredient rather than an occasion.