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Rice Waffles
Boil in milk until thoroughly soft one-half pound of rice; take from the fire, stir constantly and add, gradually, one quart of sifted flour, five beaten eggs, one-quarter of a cake of yeast, one-half pound of melted butter, a little salt and one teacup of warm milk; set in a warm place to rise; when risen, bake in the usual way.
WAFFLES-Two eggs; one pint of milk; one-half large teaspoon of butter; one and one-half teaspoons of baking powder; one-half teaspoon of salt; flour to thicken. Beat the whites and yolks of the eggs separately, melt the butter, stir it into the yolks, and add the salt, the milk and the whites of the eggs, stirring well. Beat in quickly the flour, a little of which should be mixed with the baking powder. The batter should be thin enough to pour. Bake in a waffle-iron.
WAFFLES (With Yeast) - Take one quart of flour; three eggs; one teaspoon of salt; two tablespoons of butter; one-half cup of yeast, or one-half cake of compressed yeast; one and onehalf pints of milk. Scald the milk and let it cool. Rub the butter into the flour, and add the salt, the cool milk and the yeast. Beat the mixture well for three minutes, cover, and let stand in a warm place until light, over night if possible. In the morning beat the whites and yolks of the eggs separately, and add the yolks to the batter first, and then the whites, stirring well. Les the batter stand for fifteen minutes, and cook in a waffle iron.
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Three waffle formulas run together here: a rich yeast-raised rice batter, a quick baking-powder batter, and a plain overnight yeast batter. All three assume a hinged cast-iron waffle iron set over a fire and turned by hand.
- The hinge: batter consistencyNone of the three gives a flour weight for certain. Aim for a batter that pours in a thick ribbon and settles level in the iron — looser than pancake batter for the yeast versions, since the rise thins them further. Too stiff and the waffle will not fill the grid; too thin and it runs out at the hinge.
- Quart of flourA quart of sifted flour is 4 cups, on the order of 14-16 oz. In the baking-powder version, "flour to thicken" for a pint of milk and two eggs is probably somewhere around 1 1/2 to 2 cups, but the recipe leaves it to the eye.
- Half a pound of riceA generous cup, about 1 1/4 cups, of raw long- or medium-grain rice, which will take up several cups of milk cooked slowly to a soft porridge. Cool it to warm before adding the eggs and yeast, or the eggs will scramble and the yeast will die.
- Yeast quantities"One-quarter of a cake" and "one-half cake of compressed yeast" are genuinely ambiguous — commercial cakes of the period ran anywhere from about 0.6 oz to 2 oz. For a quart of flour risen overnight, 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of instant yeast is the sensible range. The "one-half cup of yeast" is liquid homemade barm and has no direct modern equivalent.
- Half a pound of melted butterTwo full sticks in the rice batter. That is very rich, and the waffles will be closer to a fried batter than a bread. Cutting it to 4 oz gives a lighter result.
- "Bake in the usual way"The reader was expected to know: heat both faces of the iron, grease well, fill just short of the rim, close, and turn the iron once partway through. In an electric iron, medium-high heat and no turning.
- Scalding the milkIn the overnight version this was done to kill enzymes and wild organisms in raw milk, and it also strengthens the batter's structure. With pasteurized milk it is optional, though heating and cooling still gives a slightly better rise.
- Overnight rise"A warm place" meant a kitchen far cooler than most modern ones. At today's room temperature of about 70F an overnight rise will be well along by morning; if the batter smells sharply sour, it has gone too far. The refrigerator after two or three hours at room temperature is a safer overnight route.
- YieldRough estimate only: the rice batter perhaps 12-16 waffles in a standard iron; the baking-powder batter 6-8; the plain yeast batter 10-12.
Rice waffles belong to the American rice-growing South, where boiled rice went into breads, breakfast cakes and batters as routinely as cornmeal did elsewhere — rice bread, rice muffins and "rice waffles" appear across nineteenth-century Southern household books. The technique is older than chemical leavening: a batter set with yeast or barm and left overnight was one ordinary way to raise griddle-cooked batters, and adding cooked rice or leftover porridge stretched wheat flour while keeping the crumb tender. That the page carries yeast-raised and baking-powder versions side by side belongs to the period when reliable canned baking powder was displacing the overnight batter without having wholly replaced it. The recipes lean toward what a competent household cook could be trusted to finish from a hint — hence "bake in the usual way."