Home › Biscuits, Breakfast Cakes, Etc › Rice Waffles
Rice Waffles
1¾ cups flour 2/3 cup cold cooked rice 4 teaspoons baking powder ¼ teaspoon salt 1½ cups milk 1 tablespoon melted butter 2 tablespoons sugar 1 egg Mix and sift dry ingredients; work in rice with tips of fingers; add milk, yolk of egg well beaten, butter, and white of egg beaten stiff. Cook same as Waffles.
A standard Fannie Farmer waffle batter stretched with leftover rice, which gives a waffle that browns hard on the outside and stays tender within. The method is straightforward; the only real technique is folding the beaten white in last.
- Ambiguous quantitiesThe flour is printed as "134 cups" and the salt as "14 teaspoon"; the fractions have not survived legibly. Read against the rest of the book's waffle formulas, these are almost certainly 1 3/4 cups flour and 1/4 teaspoon salt, but the text as given is not reliable on either figure.
- The riceCold cooked rice, worked in with the fingertips so the grains separate and coat with flour rather than clumping. Day-old rice from the refrigerator is ideal; freshly cooked rice is too wet and sticky to distribute.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to under two cups of flour is heavy by modern standards, but waffle batters of this era leaned on it for lift. Modern double-acting powder releases its gas in two stages rather than all at once; three teaspoons will generally do.
- Folding the whiteBeat the white stiff but not dry and fold it in with a spatula at the very end. Stirring it through collapses the foam and you lose the interior lightness that distinguishes this from a pancake batter.
- "Cook same as Waffles"The base recipe is not reproduced here; in practice it means a greased, hot iron, filled just short of the edges so the batter can spread. A modern electric iron at medium-high runs three to five minutes a waffle; go by steam stopping rather than by clock.
- YieldAbout six to eight waffles depending on iron size, enough for three or four at breakfast. The batter does not hold well once the white is folded in, so cook it straight through.
Rice waffles belong to a large family of nineteenth-century American breads that used up cold cooked rice: rice muffins, rice griddle cakes, rice bread, calas in New Orleans. Rice was cheap, kept badly once cooked, and appeared at so many tables that a leftover cupful was routine. The waffle iron itself was old kitchen equipment by the 1890s, often worked over coals or set on a range top. Recipes of this period commonly refer back to a master waffle method rather than describing the cooking again, and this book is full of such cross-references, part of its larger project of standardising a household's daily baking into repeatable, measured formulas.