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American Waffles
Boil one teacupful of rice until it is quite soft; stir in with it a raw egg, one tablespoonful each of flour and milk, and beat all together to a smooth paste. Allow it to cool, put it into well-greased waffle irons, and cook. When the waffles are done on both sides, lay them on a hot plate, butter them, and serve hot.
This is a rice cake cooked in a waffle iron rather than a batter waffle, and the proportions only make sense once you accept that.
- TeacupfulA teacup in this period is usually reckoned at somewhere between half a cup and three-quarters of a cup rather than a full measuring cup. Boiled soft, that gives you roughly two cups of cooked rice.
- The paste is meant to be stiffOne tablespoon each of flour and milk against a cupful of rice will not pour. Expect a thick, sticky mass that you spoon in and press with the closing lid, not something you ladle.
- Rice "quite soft"Cook it well past pilaf stage in plenty of water until the grains break down, about 25-30 minutes, then drain. Firm separate grains will not bind and the waffle falls apart when you lift the lid.
- Let it cool, and mean itLet it cool -- The recipe stirs the egg in first and cools the paste afterwards, before it goes into the irons. If you are worried about scrambling the egg, let the rice lose its heat before adding it; the binding is what holds the whole thing together.
- The ironThe recipe's 'done on both sides' implies the hinged iron heated on the range and turned over. An electric waffle iron works; grease it more heavily than you would for batter, since rice starch sticks hard, and give it a full 4-5 minutes before opening, as the surface needs to set into a crust.
- SeasoningNo salt or sugar is specified. Salt the rice cooking water, or the finished waffle tastes flat under the butter.
- YieldTwo or three waffles, depending on the size of your iron. Serve at once with butter, or with syrup or preserves; they go leathery as they cool.
Rice waffles were a standard item in nineteenth-century American cookery, appearing in Southern books especially, where rice was cheap and plentiful and cooks routinely stretched or replaced wheat flour with it. Oscar Tschirky's book, compiled from the Waldorf's kitchen files and from the recipes he collected over a career of feeding New York, is less a restaurant menu than a very large reference shelf, and entries like this one are domestic Americana gathered in alongside the hotel's own dishes. Using leftover boiled rice this way was ordinary thrift: the same logic produced rice griddle cakes, rice muffins and rice bread, all of them ways of turning yesterday's pot of rice into today's hot breakfast.