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Rice Pancakes
979. Boil half a pound of rice to a jelly in a small quantity of water; when cold mix it with a pint of cream, eight eggs, a bit of salt and nutmeg; stir in eight ounces of butter just warmed, and add as much flour as will make the batter thick enough. Fry in as little lard or dripping as possible.
A rich Victorian batter — half its bulk is cream, eggs and butter — thickened with rice cooked down to a paste. It fries more like a thick drop pancake than a crepe.
- Rice "boiled to a jelly"Use a short-grain pudding rice and simmer it with water until the grains collapse into a stiff, sticky paste with no free liquid, roughly 30-40 minutes. Long-grain rice keeps its shape and will give a lumpy batter.
- Cool it fullyThe rice must be cold before the cream and eggs go in, or the eggs will begin to set. Spread it thin on a tray to speed this up.
- PintA British pint is 20 fl oz (about 570 ml), not the 16 fl oz US pint. Halve the whole recipe if you want a manageable quantity.
- The flour is unmeasured"As much flour as will make the batter thick enough" is the weak point of the instructions. Add it a spoonful at a time until the batter drops heavily from the spoon rather than pouring; with this much cream, egg and butter it will take a good deal.
- Warmed butterEight ounces of butter should be melted and barely warm, not hot, and stirred in steadily so it emulsifies rather than seizing into flecks against the cold rice.
- FryingLard or beef dripping gives the crisp edge the recipe intends; a neutral oil works. Keep the pan at a steady medium heat — the batter is heavy with butter and eggs and will scorch before the centre cooks if the pan is too hot.
- YieldAs written this makes a great deal of batter, upwards of twenty pancakes. It was written for a household table, not for two.
Rice pancakes turn up in English domestic manuals from the eighteenth century onward. The technique is the same one behind rice puddings and ground-rice cakes: boil the grain until its starch breaks down, then use that starch to carry eggs and cream. Walsh's cookery book of 1859 was a compilation, gathering established household receipts of this kind rather than inventing them, and the compressed telegraphic phrasing here — a list of ingredients with the proportions of flour left to the cook's judgement — is characteristic of how such receipts were passed along.