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Rice Waffles
One teacupful of flour, sift with a teaspoonful of baking powder, one cupful of cold boiled rice, one tablespoonful melted butter, one-half of a teaspoonful of salt and three beaten eggs. Mash the rice fine, and the butter, then two teacupfuls of milk with the flour and then the eggs.
Beat all together. Have the waffle irons hot and well greased with butter. Fill three-quarters full and let the first side be well browned before turning.
A leftover-rice batter that produces waffles crisper outside and more custardy inside than a plain flour batter. The measurements shift between "teacupful" and "cupful," which matters here because the flour-to-liquid ratio is already loose.
- Teacupful vs. cupfulA teacup in this period is usually reckoned at something under a modern measuring cup, commonly about 6 fluid ounces, while a "cupful" is taken as the full 8 ounces; the usage was not standardised. Read that way, the recipe gives roughly 3/4 cup flour to 1 1/2 cups milk, which is very thin. If your batter will not coat the back of a spoon, add flour by the tablespoon rather than more rice.
- The rice is the hingeMash the cold boiled rice until no whole grains remain and it has become a paste with the melted butter. Unmashed grains sit in pockets, steam rather than crisp, and make the waffle tear when you lift the iron.
- Cold rice, not warmThe recipe specifies cold boiled rice, which in practice means yesterday's leftovers; plain boiled rice, thoroughly cooled, is what is wanted.
- Order of mixingThe instruction is compressed: rice and butter together, then the milk with the sifted flour and baking powder, then the beaten eggs. The recipe says to beat all together. Bake soon after mixing — the baking powder starts working immediately.
- Waffle ironsThese are stovetop cast-iron irons that are physically flipped partway through baking, which is why the recipe tells you to brown one side first. An electric waffle iron does the turning for you; ignore that line, grease the plates well, and go by colour rather than the clock.
- Filling the ironThree-quarters full is right for a batter this loose — it spreads more than a stiff batter and will overflow if you treat the plates as a measuring cup. Judge by the first waffle and adjust.
- YieldPerhaps four to six waffles depending on the size of your iron; the recipe gives no yield. The batter does not hold well overnight; bake it all and reheat leftovers in a toaster or a hot oven.
Rice breads, waffles and griddle cakes were a standing feature of American cookbooks wherever rice was cheap and often left over from the previous day's dinner — most persistently in the Carolinas and Georgia, where rice had been a Lowcountry staple since the colonial era, but by the late nineteenth century in general household manuals as well. The waffle iron itself is conventionally said to have come to America with Dutch and German settlers, and hinged cast-iron irons worked over a stove top were standard kitchen equipment through the early twentieth century. A recipe like this one answers to two things at once: it uses up cold cooked rice, and it turns a plain supper batter into something that looks like an accomplishment.