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Rice Muffins
cup cooked rice cup sweet milk 4 tablespoonfuls melted butter 4 teaspoonfuls bakingpowder 2 cups flour 3 tablespoonfuls sugar 1 egg 1 scant teaspoonful salt Sift together the sugar, salt, baking-powder, and flour. Beat the egg light, stir in the rice and milk, and add the dry materials. Beat in the butter last. Pour into warm, greased muffin-pans and bake in a hot oven about twenty-five minutes.
A straightforward baking-powder muffin stretched with yesterday's boiled rice. The transcription has lost a few numerals, so read the quantities carefully before you start.
- Missing numbersThe rice and milk both begin "cup" with no figure — most likely 1 cup of each, which balances the 2 cups of flour and gives a batter loose enough to pour, as the recipe directs. Treat it as one cup each rather than guessing higher.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that older recipes often called for. No substitution needed.
- A hot ovenRoughly 400–450F by modern equivalents for a period "hot oven"; the recipe itself gives no temperature. Twenty-five minutes at that heat suits a deep, well-filled muffin cup; check at eighteen minutes if your tins are shallow.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons for two cups of flour is heavy by modern standards; period powders were single-acting rather than double-acting, and strength varied by brand. Three teaspoons of current powder should lift these adequately.
- The riceCold cooked rice clumps. Break it up in the beaten egg and milk before the flour goes in, or you will get dense pockets. Leftover plain white rice works best; anything seasoned or oily will show.
- Butter lastThe recipe adds the melted butter after the flour. Fold it in with a few strokes and stop; overbeating at this stage toughens the muffin.
- Warm pansGreasing and warming the tins before the batter goes in gives an immediate rise at the edges. Worth doing, and easy if the tins sit on the stovetop while the oven heats.
- YieldAbout twelve standard muffins. Best within a few hours; the rice keeps them moist for a day but they stale quickly after that.
Rice muffins belong to a long American habit of quick breads built on cooked grain — rice, hominy, oatmeal, leftover mush — that softens the crumb and stretches the flour. The technique is strongest in the rice-growing South, where breads and waffles made with boiled Carolina rice were common, and by the late nineteenth century the formula had travelled into general household cookbooks. The thrift is the point: the rice here is not an ingredient bought for the purpose but a bowl of yesterday's supper that would otherwise be thrown out. Chemical leavening made this kind of thrift quick, since a cook could turn cold rice into hot bread in half an hour without waiting on yeast.