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Rice Bread
Add three-fourths a cup of rice, cooked until tender and still hot, and, also, two tablespoonfuls of butter, to the milk or water in the first recipe. Other cereals, as oatmeal or cerealine, may be used instead of rice.
This is a variation, not a standalone formula: it assumes the plain yeast bread printed just above it in the sandwich chapter. Read that dough first, then treat these lines as an amendment to its liquid.
- What you are amending"The first recipe" is the bread recipe immediately preceding this one; all this text tells us is that its liquid is milk or water. The rice and butter are added to that liquid.
- Cool the liquidThe rice goes in hot so it will melt the butter and break down into the liquid. If the base dough is yeast-raised, let the mixture cool to blood heat before the yeast goes in; hot liquid will kill yeast.
- Rice measureThe wording most likely means three-fourths of a cup of cooked rice (roughly 4 oz, about a scant 1/4 cup of raw long-grain rice before boiling), though a raw measure cannot be ruled out. Boil it soft in plenty of water and drain it; starchy risotto rice will make the crumb gummy.
- CerealineA flaked and dried corn cereal sold in the 1890s, closer to a coarse cornflake than to cornmeal. It has no modern equivalent on the shelf; cooked oatmeal, cooked cracked wheat or cooked cornmeal mush all stand in, used at the same measure and the same soft consistency.
- Hold back flourCooked cereal carries a good deal of water, so the dough will take less flour than the plain version; add flour cautiously and aim for a soft, slightly tacky dough.
- ButterTwo tablespoonfuls is 1 oz. It enriches and softens the crumb.
Adding cooked rice or porridge to a wheat dough is much older than the sandwich, and served two purposes at once — it stretched expensive white flour, and the retained water kept the loaf soft, a real advantage before wrapped bread. Rice breads are especially associated with the Carolina and Georgia lowcountry, where rice was the local crop and rice flour and cooked rice both went into breads and rolls, though the practice was general enough by the end of the century to appear in Northern cooking-school books as a plain economy. Cerealine, offered here as an alternative, was a flaked corn product familiar enough in the 1890s to be named without explanation, and it disappeared from the market within a few decades.