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Bread with Rice
Three tea-cups rice-flour, one of wheat-flour, one heaping teaspoon cream of tartar rubbed in flour, two well-beaten eggs, a tablespoon butter, one-half tea-spoon soda, and sweet milk, to consistency of pound-cake. Salt to taste. -Mrs. Hill, Va.
A chemically leavened batter bread, not a yeast loaf: the rice flour carries no gluten, so the eggs and the cream of tartar–soda pair do all the lifting. Mix it and get it into the oven at once.
- Teacup measureA 19th-century tea-cup is usually reckoned at roughly 3/4 cup, though the measure was not standardised. On that reading the recipe gives about 2 1/4 cups rice flour to 3/4 cup wheat flour; using level 1-cup measures throughout keeps the 3-to-1 ratio intact.
- Cream of tartar and sodaOne heaping teaspoon cream of tartar with half a teaspoon soda is the home-made equivalent of about 2 teaspoons baking powder. Sift both thoroughly through the dry flours — "rubbed in flour" means dispersed, not dumped, or you get bitter yellow streaks.
- Consistency of pound-cakeThe hinge of the recipe. Add milk until the batter is thick and drops heavily from the spoon rather than pouring — expect somewhere around 1 to 1 1/2 cups, depending on how finely your rice flour is milled. Rice flour absorbs liquid slowly, so let it sit a minute before judging.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk. Whole milk suits it; buttermilk would react with the soda before baking and upset the acid balance already supplied by the cream of tartar.
- Rice flourModern finely milled white rice flour behaves well here. Coarser stone-ground or brown rice flour will give a grittier texture, if that is what you want.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given. A greased 8-inch square pan or shallow round pan at 375–400F for 30–40 minutes, until well risen and firm at the center, is a reasonable modern reading. A shallow pan is the safer choice for a heavy batter with no gluten structure.
- Salt"To taste" in a batter this size means about 1/2 teaspoon.
- Yield and servingOne pan, eight to ten squares. Breads of this kind tend to stale and crumble quickly, so they are best eaten warm.
Rice flour in a Southern bread book is a direct legacy of the Carolina and Georgia rice coast, where rice was a staple crop from the colonial period onward and broken grain and rice flour — the fraction too damaged to sell whole — moved cheaply into local kitchens. Rice breads, rice waffles and the soft rice bread called philpy appear across 19th-century Southern cookery, and they were doubly useful in a region where wheat flour was often expensive or, during and after the Civil War, simply scarce. The Dixie Cook Book, a compilation gathered from contributors and credited by name and state as here, preserves that habit of stretching a cup of wheat flour with something homegrown. The cream of tartar and soda pairing dates the method too: it is the household substitute for commercial baking powder, which was on the market by this period but by no means in every pantry.