Rice Waffles
1 quart of dry cooked rice. 1 1/2 pints of milk. 1 pound of flour. 4 eggs. Salt. 10 yolks. 1 basting-spoonful of butter. 1 basting-spoonful of syrup. 2 teaspoonfuls of baking powder.
Mash the rice with the milk, mix up like rice batter cakes. But to divert attention from waffles it is only necessary to announce clam pancakes. And surely they are a Yankee invention and of local fame only at that, for nowhere in print, not even on clam can-labels can such a dish apparently be found. This is the route by which clam pancakes have reached these columns: A number of pleasure-seeking people occupying the broad piazza and the hundred rustic chairs at a hotel in the shadow of Pikes Peak, between dancing and promenading and the pause in the music got to talking about the sea-side and per consequence about clams. There was one among them who had travelled on the staff of the Grand Duke Alexis, and speaking of various persons' likes and preferences it came at last to "O, clams plain are all very well, clam fritters, clam stew, clam patties, but leaving out chowder there is nothing made of clams equal to our Yankee clam pancakes". "Why cant we have them here?" "Why of course we can."
It is true Pikes Peak is a long way from Clamdom but canned clams do very well. The cook had to be instructed, and after that still ventured to ask "What do you eat with them?" "Butter and syrup, just like any the other batter cakes,"
A cook's shorthand from a trade column: the ingredient list is complete, the method is four words long. Everything below fills in what a hotel baker of the 1890s would have supplied from habit.
- The rice is the pointA quart of cold cooked rice, drained dry and not sticky, is mashed into the milk until it breaks down into a smooth slurry before anything else joins it. Lumps of intact grain will steam rather than crisp and the waffle stays soggy in the middle.
- Basting-spoonfulA basting spoon was a large spoon and the measure was never standardised; something in the region of 2 tablespoons is the usual working reading. Take it as roughly 2 tablespoons melted butter and 2 tablespoons syrup, the latter for browning as much as sweetness.
- Fourteen eggs, effectivelyFour whole eggs plus ten yolks is a professional's ratio, built for richness and a tender crumb in a batch that fills a hotel griddle. Halving the whole formula still leaves a workable batter.
- A pound of flourAbout 3 1/2 cups by modern scoop, though weighing it is safer. With 1 1/2 pints of milk (3 cups) plus the mashed rice, the batter should pour thickly and slump, not run.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to a pound of flour is light by current practice, which tends toward a teaspoon per cup. The eggs presumably made up some of the difference, though the recipe gives no mixing instruction beyond 'mix up like rice batter cakes'; a batter left standing will lose some of the powder's lift.
- Waffle ironsThe recipe gives no baking instruction at all; a kitchen of the period would most likely have used a heavy hinged iron heated over a range and greased between each waffle. In a modern electric iron, let the plates reach full heat and grease them anyway, since rice batters stick more than plain ones.
- YieldAs written this makes a large batch, in the region of 16 to 20 waffles depending on iron size. It halves cleanly.
- The clam pancakesNo quantities, no method, no recipe. Everything after "mix up like rice batter cakes" is the author's newspaper filler and cannot be cooked from.
Rice waffles belong to the rice-growing South, where cold leftover rice went into breads, batter cakes and waffles as a matter of course, and Charleston and Savannah cookbooks carry versions well into the twentieth century. The quantities here — a pound of flour, fourteen eggs' worth of yolk, milk by the pint — are hotel quantities, and the abrupt swerve into a story about clam pancakes on a piazza below Pikes Peak is the signature of a book assembled from trade-press columns written for professional cooks and stewards, where an anecdote about the Grand Duke Alexis's travelling staff was as much the product as the formula. It also preserves a small fact about the late nineteenth-century pantry — the page itself gives no date, and the Grand Duke Alexis reference, his American tour having fallen in 1871-72, sets only a rough earliest point: canned clams were common enough that a Colorado resort kitchen could produce a New England dish on request, and the cook's question — "What do you eat with them?" — is the honest reaction of someone who had never seen one.