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Rice Cake
One pound sugar, a pound of ground rice, half pound butter, nine eggs, rose-water to taste; add a little salt, beat butter and sugar together, add rose-water, salt and eggs, lastly the rice; bake in shallow pans. - Governor Rice, Mass.
This is a pound-cake formula with rice flour standing in for wheat, so it is gluten-free by accident rather than design. Everything depends on how much air you beat into the butter, sugar and eggs, since there is no chemical leavening at all.
- Ground rice is rice flourNineteenth-century "ground rice" is rice milled fine, close to what is sold today as rice flour, though often a little coarser. A pound is roughly 3 cups; measure by weight, since rice flour packs very differently from wheat.
- The hinge: all the lift is mechanicalWith no baking powder, the cake rises only on air. Cream the butter and sugar until visibly pale and light, then add the nine eggs one at a time, beating well after each, and fold the rice flour in at the end without deflating the batter.
- Nine eggs is not a misprintNine eggs may not be a misprint -- eggs of the period were often smaller than modern large ones. Seven or eight large eggs (about 400 g shelled) may come closer to what was intended.
- Rose-water "to taste"Modern rose water varies widely in strength. Start with a teaspoon for this quantity, taste the batter, and stop well short of perfume.
- Shallow pans and oven heatTwo 9-inch round pans or a 9x13 sheet, buttered and lined. The recipe gives no oven heat; 325-350F for 30-40 minutes for rounds is a reasonable modern setting. Tent with foil if the top colors before the center sets.
- Texture to expectRice flour gives a fine, slightly sandy crumb that firms up as it cools, closer to a Madeira cake than a sponge. Cool completely before slicing or it will crumble.
- YieldThe full quantity is large -- roughly 3 1/2 lb of batter, enough for 16 to 20 slices. It halves cleanly if that is more cake than you want.
Rice flour cakes were a fixture of Southern and coastal baking wherever rice was cheaper or more reliable than wheat, and Charleston and Savannah cooks in particular treated ground rice as an ordinary pantry staple rather than a substitute. The rose-water flavoring marks the recipe as old-fashioned even for the 1880s: rose and orange-flower waters were the standard sweet perfumes of eighteenth-century English baking and were steadily displaced through the nineteenth century by vanilla extract. The attribution to "Governor Rice, Mass." is the sort of contributed-recipe credit that fills nineteenth-century compilations of this kind; Alexander Hamilton Rice was governor of Massachusetts from 1876 to 1879, and one might guess that the coincidence of his surname with the cake's main ingredient had something to do with the pairing being printed.