Home › Biscuits, Breakfast Cakes, Etc › Rice Muffins
Rice Muffins
2¼ cups flour ¾ cup hot cooked rice. 5 teaspoons baking powder 2 tablespoons sugar 1 cup milk 1 egg 2 tablespoons melted butter 1/2 teaspoon salt Mix and sift flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder; add one-half milk, egg well beaten, the remainder of the milk mixed with rice, and beat thoroughly; then add butter. Bake in buttered muffin rings placed in buttered pan or buttered gem pans.
A standard Farmer-era quick bread built on leftover boiled rice. Note before you start that the transcribed ingredient list is incomplete: neither the flour nor the rice quantity survives in this printing.
- The missing quantitiesThe method calls for flour and rice that the ingredient list does not give. Comparable rice muffin formulas of the period use about 2 cups flour and 1 cup cold cooked rice; treat those as reconstruction, not as the book's own figures.
- Rice must be cold and broken upRice -- The recipe says only to mix the rice with the remaining milk; it does not specify temperature or condition. Cold boiled rice worked into the milk until the grains separate will distribute more evenly than warm or clumped rice, though this is inference rather than instruction.
- Baking powderFive teaspoons is a large amount, reflecting the single-acting cream-of-tartar powders of the period. Against the reconstructed 2 cups of flour, around 3 teaspoons of modern double-acting powder would be closer to current practice; the full amount risks a metallic taste and a coarse crumb.
- Gem pans and muffin ringsGem pans were heavy cast iron with deep oval cups; muffin rings were plain metal bands set on a flat sheet, which is why the recipe says to butter both ring and pan. An ordinary 12-cup muffin tin does the same work.
- OvenThe original gives no temperature. Muffins of this type belong in a hot oven, 400-425F, for 20 to 25 minutes.
- Mixing orderThe milk goes in in two parts, with the beaten egg between, and the rice arrives with the second half. The recipe gives no reason for this. Once the melted butter is added, stop stirring beyond combining.
- YieldPerhaps 12 muffins on the reconstructed quantities, though the missing flour and rice make this uncertain. Best eaten warm the day they are baked.
Rice muffins belong to a large family of nineteenth-century American quick breads designed around yesterday's cooked grain -- rice, hominy, or cornmeal mush folded into a batter rather than thrown out. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book devotes a long chapter to such breakfast cakes, hot bread at breakfast being a common expectation and one that chemical leavening made quick to satisfy; Fannie Farmer is associated with the push toward level, measured quantities, though she was not alone in it and the shift was already under way. Rice was cheap, kept poorly once boiled, and was cooked in quantity, so recipes for using it up appear throughout the period's cookbooks -- in croquettes, puddings, griddle cakes and muffins like this one.