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Rice Griddle Cakes
One pint of boiled rice; two pints of milk; one and one-half pints of flour; three eggs; one teaspoon of baking powder; one teaspoon of salt; one tablespoon of sugar; one tablespoon of melted butter. Put the cooked rice to soak over night in a pint of the milk, and in the morning add the flour, salt, sugar and butter. Beat the mixture well, and add the eggs, well beaten, and the other pint of milk, into which the baking powder has been stirred. This makes enough cakes for six or seven persons.
A thin, custardy batter that leans on leftover rice for tenderness rather than on leavening. Two things decide the outcome: where the batter rests overnight, and how thin it goes onto the griddle.
- Refrigerate the overnight soakThe original assumes a cool larder. Cooked rice standing in milk at room temperature overnight is a poor idea on two counts, so cover the bowl and refrigerate it. Bring it back toward room temperature before mixing in the morning.
- The measures in cupsA pint is 2 cups, so: 2 cups boiled rice, 4 cups milk total (2 cups for the soak, 2 cups later), and 3 cups flour. The rice is measured cooked, not raw — about 2/3 cup of raw long-grain rice will get you there.
- Leavening is deliberately lightOne teaspoon of baking powder to three cups of flour is far below modern practice, and the eggs are meant to do most of the lifting. These are not fluffy stacks; expect flat, tender, slightly chewy cakes. If you want more rise, a full tablespoon of baking powder is the modern proportion, though it changes the character of the cake.
- Stirring powder into milkDissolving the baking powder in the second pint of milk is an instruction that turns up fairly often in cookbooks of this period, though how general the practice was is hard to document. It works fine, but it starts the reaction immediately — cook the batter promptly rather than letting it sit.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 375F, lightly greased; the original says nothing about heat. These cakes need a moment longer in the centre than a plain wheat batter, so resist raising the heat.
- Batter consistencyFour cups of milk to three cups of flour gives a batter that pours very loose. That is correct; spread it thin and small, and turn the cakes only once, as they are fragile until set.
- Yield"Six or seven persons" comes out at roughly thirty small cakes, depending on how thin you spread them. Halve the recipe for a household of three.
Rice griddle cakes belong to the long American habit of turning yesterday's cooked grain into today's breakfast — the same thrift that produced hominy cakes, oatmeal pancakes and bread-crumb griddle cakes, which are common companions to this sort of recipe in period cookbooks. Rice was a Lowcountry Carolina and Gulf Coast staple, and rice breads, waffles and cakes appear widely in nineteenth-century printed cookery. The overnight soak looks like an older technique showing through: batters were left to stand so the grain could soften and swell, and the single teaspoon of baking powder may well be a later addition to an older method. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, also issued a line of household guides aimed at middle-class women managing kitchens without much staff, where a dish that used up cold rice and stretched to seven servings needed no further justification.