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Rice Griddle Cakes
1 cup cold boiled rice cup milk 1 teaspoonful baking- 1 tablespoonful melted butter 1 teaspoonful sugar 1 teaspoonful salt powder
A thrift breakfast built on the previous night's rice. The proportions given are for a single cup of cooked rice, which makes a small batch.
- The rice matters mostCold rice fresh from the refrigerator is stiff and clumped; break it apart with a fork or your fingers before anything else, or the cakes cook around lumps of packed grain. Long-grain rice gives distinct grains in the finished cake, short-grain a softer, almost pudding-like crumb.
- Flour and eggThe list as printed carries no flour quantity and no egg, and rice alone will not bind a griddle cake. Use the proportion your own batter needs to pour thickly from the spoon; something on the order of a cup of flour and one egg to a cup of rice is a reasonable working guess, though the printed list gives no warrant for any figure.
- Baking powderA teaspoonful of baking powder is the ordinary leavening for about a cup of flour. Many baking powders of the period were single-acting, so the batter was meant to go to the griddle at once. Modern double-acting powder is more forgiving, but these cakes are still best cooked immediately.
- SaltA full teaspoonful of salt is generous for this quantity, particularly if the leftover rice was already salted. Half that is closer to modern taste.
- Melted butterIf you add an egg, let the butter cool slightly before it goes in, or it will begin to set the egg. Warm, not hot.
- Griddle heatA cast-iron griddle at 375F, or medium on the stovetop, is right: hot enough that a drop of water skitters, not so hot that the outside colors before the center sets. Rice cakes are heavier than plain pancakes and want a little longer per side, about three minutes and then two.
- YieldDepends entirely on how much flour and milk you add, since the printed list fixes neither; expect a modest batch of three-inch cakes. The batter does not keep; scale up rather than hold it.
Books of left-overs are often said to have been a genre of their own in American and British publishing from the 1890s through the First World War, when a middle-class kitchen was expected to account for every scrap and the cook, not the householder, took the blame for waste. Rice was a staple of that economy: cheap, filling, and left in the pot after almost any boiled or curried dish. Turning it into griddle cakes follows the same logic as hominy cakes, oatmeal muffins and bread-crumb pancakes found alongside it in the cereals chapter, all of which stretch a small amount of flour and a single egg with something already cooked. The technique long predates the cookbook trade, and cold-rice pancakes appear in many places where rice is a daily grain rather than an occasional side dish.