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Rice Batter Cakes
One heaping coffee cup of raw rice makes the following quantity: 1 quart of cooked rice. 1 1/2 pints of milk. 1 pound, or quart, of flour. 1 basting-spoonful of syrup. 4 to 6 eggs. 1 teaspoonful of salt. 2 teaspoonful of baking powder.
Mash the dry-cooked rice in a pan with a little of the milk, which should be warm, till there are no lumps left, then add flour and milk alternately keeping it firm enough to work smooth. Add the other ingredients and beat well. Buttermilk and soda can be used if desired, instead of powder and sweet milk.
A rice griddle cake batter of the kind Southern hotel kitchens turned out by the hundred. The proportions work, but two of the measures are period shorthand and the batter behaves differently from a plain flour one.
- Coffee cup and basting-spoonA coffee cup in this period is usually reckoned at about 1 cup (8 fl oz); heaping, call it a generous cup of raw rice, which the recipe itself says yields about a quart cooked. A basting-spoonful is a long-handled serving spoon of no standard size — a tablespoon or two of syrup, a small enough quantity that it reads as an aid to browning rather than a sweetener.
- A quart of flourThe book equates a quart with a pound, and that is the figure to use: weigh 1 lb (450 g) all-purpose flour rather than measuring by volume, since a modern quart of flour can run anywhere from about 17 to 20 oz depending on how it is filled.
- "Dry-cooked rice"This means rice steamed or boiled until the grains are tender and the pan is dry, not creamy or soupy.
- The hinge: mash before you add flourThe recipe has you warm the milk and work the rice smooth before any flour goes in, and it is worth following: lumps left at this stage will not come out later. The mashed rice should be a smooth thick paste before the flour is added.
- Buttermilk and soda substitutionIf you take the alternative, use about 1/2 teaspoon baking soda per cup of buttermilk — roughly 1 1/2 teaspoons soda for the 1 1/2 pints here — and omit the baking powder. Cook these promptly, as the soda begins working on contact.
- Griddle heatA moderate griddle, around 375F on an electric one, or a heavy pan where a drop of water skitters rather than sits. Give them longer than a plain batter cake and check that the centre is set before turning.
- Consistency and yieldThin with a little more milk if the batter mounds rather than spreads; it should pour thickly. As written this is a very large batch — roughly 3 dozen cakes of 4 inches, enough for 8 to 10 people. Halving it is straightforward.
Rice batter cakes belong to the rice-growing South, where the Carolina and Louisiana crops made cooked rice a routine leftover and cooks used it to stretch wheat flour. Adding cooked grain or boiled potato to a griddle batter was a common enough way to do the same thing, and it has a real culinary payoff: the starch keeps the cakes moist and tender in a way straight flour cannot. The scale of the quantities here, and the casual instruction to substitute buttermilk and soda for baking powder as available, mark this as a professional recipe rather than a household one — The American Pastry Cook was written for men working hotel and restaurant kitchens, where both leavenings would have been on hand and breakfast meant cooking for a dining room.