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Rice Griddle-Cakes
Boil half a cup rice; when cold mix one quart sweet milk, the yolks of four eggs, and flour sufficient to make a stiff batter; beat the whites to a froth, stir in one tea-spoon soda, and two of cream tartar; add a little salt, and lastly the whites of eggs; bake on a griddle. A nice way to serve is to spread them while hot with butter, and almost any kind of preserves or jelly; roll them up neatly, cut off the ends, sprinkle them with sugar, and serve immediately. -Mrs. Walter Mitchell, Gallipolis.
A leftover-rice pancake batter leavened with soda and cream of tartar rather than baking powder. The one thing that matters: the leavening and the beaten whites go in at the very end, and the batter goes onto the griddle immediately.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured whole milk — the distinction mattered when buttermilk and clabber were always on hand. A quart is 4 cups.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda to two of cream of tartar is homemade baking powder in the standard proportion, and it acts the moment it hits the wet batter. It has no second rise the way double-acting commercial powder does, so cook straight away rather than letting the bowl stand.
- "Stiff batter" versus rollingThe two halves of the recipe pull against each other. A genuinely stiff batter will not roll around a filling without cracking; aim for a thick but pourable batter, thinner than a drop-biscuit dough, and spread each cake out on the griddle.
- Flour quantityThe original leaves this to judgment. Add the flour gradually, stopping when the batter is as thick as you want it, and hold some back — the rice goes on absorbing liquid as the batter stands.
- The riceHalf a cup measured raw, boiled and cooled, gives roughly a cup and a half cooked. Cold rice is specified: warm rice will slacken the batter.
- Griddle heatA cast-iron griddle at about 375F, lightly greased. These cakes are heavier than plain flour pancakes and brown more slowly; give them time to set before turning or the rice grains will tear the surface.
- Folding the whitesBeat the whites until they hold a soft peak, not dry, and fold rather than stir. Whites are doing structural work here alongside the chemical leavening.
- YieldA quart of milk makes a great deal of batter — roughly 24 to 30 cakes of pancake size, serving six to eight. Halve it for a small household.
- ServingButter, jam, rolled, ends trimmed, sugared — essentially a crêpe treatment. It only works while the cakes are hot and flexible, so fill and roll as they come off the griddle.
Rice griddle-cakes belong to the thrift end of nineteenth-century cooking, where a bowl of cold boiled rice left from dinner was a standing ingredient rather than a leftover; rice was a cheaper and more everyday staple in the South than in the North, though this particular contributor writes from Ohio. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing dates the recipe to the period when cooks still mixed their own leavening from two tins, a habit that outlived the arrival of packaged baking powder by decades. The contributor's line, Gallipolis, points to the Ohio River town founded in 1790 by French settlers, one of many small-town names that make this book a collection of household practice rather than a single author's.