Rice Waffles
1¾ cups flour 2 tablespoons sugar 2/3 cup cold cooked rice 1/4 teaspoon salt 1¼ cups milk 1 egg 3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1 tablespoon melted butter Sift together flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. add milk, yolk of egg, well beaten; then butter and white of egg after beating stiff. Cook as waffles.
A short, sound waffle batter from a baking-powder company's promotional booklet. The fractions have been mangled by the original typesetting, and the rice never reappears in the method, so read the ingredient list carefully before you start.
- The garbled fractions"13/4 cups flour" is 1¾ cups; "11/4 cups milk" is 1¼ cups. Both are consistent with a pourable waffle batter and with the rest of the proportions.
- The rice is missing from the methodThe instructions never say when to add the ⅔ cup of cold cooked rice. Stir it into the batter after the milk and yolk, before folding in the beaten white, so the grains are distributed without deflating the foam.
- Cold rice, and whyLeftover rice that has chilled is firm and separate; warm rice turns pasty and will thicken the batter unevenly. Plain boiled long-grain or medium-grain works; avoid seasoned or oiled rice.
- Calumet Baking PowderCalumet was a double-acting baking powder, and the brand is still sold. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes one for one at the same 3 level teaspoons.
- Folding the whiteThe separated egg is the whole point of the texture here. Beat the white to soft-stiff peaks and fold it in last with a few strokes; overmixing gives you a flat, tough waffle.
- Iron heatA modern electric iron on medium-high, or a stovetop iron heated until a drop of water skitters, is right. Grease it even if it is nonstick, since this batter has only a tablespoon of butter.
- TimingThree to five minutes per waffle. The steam-stops-rising test is less reliable with a rice batter, since moisture in the grains may keep it steaming; go by color.
- YieldAbout four to five 7-inch round waffles, or three large square Belgian-style ones. Serve at once; rice waffles soften quickly as they sit.
Reliable Recipes belongs to a genre that dominated American home baking from the 1890s onward: the free booklet issued by a baking-powder manufacturer, in this case the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, in which leavened recipes name the brand by name. Rice in a batter was thrift rather than novelty. Cooked rice was a common supper starch, and a cup of it left over could go into griddle cakes, muffins, croquettes or waffles the next morning, adding moisture and a slight chew for nothing. Bread-crumb and cold-oatmeal pancakes appear in the period's cookbooks on the same logic. Waffles were widely chemically leavened in the United States by this date; the older yeast-raised versions, which needed an overnight rise, were steadily displaced as packaged baking powders made a quick batter possible.