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Rice Waffles
45 Boil half a pint of rice and let it get cold, mix with it one-fourth pound butter and a little salt. Sift in it one and a half pints flour, beat five eggs separately, stir the yolks together with one quart milk, add whites beaten to a stiff froth, beat hard, and bake at once in waffle-iron. - Mrs. S. C. Lee, Baltimore, Md.
A batter leavened entirely by egg white, with cooked rice standing in for part of the starch. Everything hinges on getting it into the iron before the froth collapses.
- Bake at once, and mean itThere is no baking powder or soda here; the only lift comes from the beaten whites. Have the iron hot and greased before the whites go in, and cook straight away. Note that the original itself says to "beat hard" after the whites are added, rather than folding.
- Half a pint of riceAlmost certainly the measure taken before boiling: 1 cup of raw rice, which yields roughly 3 cups cooked. Cook it soft, spread it out to cool completely, and break up any clumps before mixing, or you get dense pockets in the finished waffle.
- The other measuresA quarter pound of butter is 1/2 cup (1 stick), softened so it works into the rice. A pint and a half of flour is 3 cups. "A little salt" means about 1 teaspoon for a batch this size.
- The batter is thinA quart of milk against 3 cups of flour gives something closer to crepe batter than modern waffle batter, loosened further by the rice. Thin batters of this sort are common in period waffle recipes; expect a thin, crisp waffle rather than a thick fluffy one.
- Eggs beaten separatelyYolks into the milk, whites to a stiff froth. As printed, "beat hard" comes after the whites are added, though a lighter hand at that stage will preserve more of the froth.
- Iron and heatThe original assumes a hinged cast-iron iron turned over a fire, greased for each waffle. In an electric iron use a medium-high setting and expect the first one to be a test; the butter in the batter encourages quick browning.
- YieldAround 10 cups of batter - a large batch, enough for well over a dozen waffles in a standard iron. The batter does not hold well, so halve it if you are cooking for two or three.
Rice appears constantly in nineteenth-century Southern breakfast breads - rice waffles, rice muffins, rice griddle cakes, philpy - because rice was a staple crop of the Carolina and Georgia lowcountry and cold leftover rice was a daily reality in kitchens that boiled a pot of it most days. Using it up in a breakfast cake was thrift as much as taste, though the result is genuinely better than plain flour: the cooked grains keep the interior moist while the thin batter crisps at the edges. The Dixie Cook Book gathered such recipes by contribution and printed them with the donor's name and city attached, which is why this one carries a Baltimore address - a city with culinary traffic both north and south.