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Rice Bread
Mrs. E. S. Cheesebrough.
Boil a teacup of rice quite soft ; while hot, add butt the size of an egg, one and a-half pints of milk, rath more than one-half pint of bolted corn meal, two tab spoons of flour, two eggs and a little salt. Bake ju one hour. The bread should be about two inches thick
This is a spoonbread-style batter bread rather than a loaf: no yeast, no soda, and enough milk and egg to keep the crumb custardy. The text has been clipped by the scanner in a few places ("butt the size of an egg", "rath more than", "Bake ju one hour"), but the quantities are recoverable.
- The hingeThe rice must be cooked to complete softness and still hot when the butter and milk go in, so the grains slacken and disperse. Cold, firm rice stays as separate pellets and the finished bread turns gritty and layered instead of tender.
- Teacup of riceA period teacup is usually reckoned at somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a cup, so roughly 4 to 6 oz of raw rice, which boils up to something over 2 cups cooked. Use a plain long- or medium-grain white rice, boiled in water and drained, not a pilaf.
- Butter the size of an eggStandard nineteenth-century shorthand for about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons.
- Bolted corn mealBolted means sifted through cloth to remove the coarse bran, giving a finer meal than unsifted stone-ground meal; it is not the same as modern degerminated meal, though a fine yellow or white cornmeal is the nearest match. "Rather more than one-half pint" is a little over a cup.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none. A moderate oven, 350F, for the full hour suits a batter this wet; the top should be set and browned and the centre just firm.
- Pan and depthTwo inches thick is the instruction that fixes the pan. With three cups of milk plus the cooked rice and the meal the batter runs well over a quart, so it wants a large dish -- a 9-inch square or bigger, well buttered. Spread thinner and it dries into a cornbread; deeper and the middle may still be soft at an hour.
- No leaveningThe two eggs are the only lift, and there is no baking powder or soda. Expect a dense, moist, pudding-like crumb. The recipe gives no serving instruction beyond the two-inch depth.
- YieldSix to eight servings as a side bread with butter, at a meal rather than at breakfast.
Rice breads belong to the American rice country, above all the Carolina and Georgia lowcountry, where rice was grown as a commodity crop and cooked rice was cheap enough to be treated as an ordinary bread ingredient. Combining boiled rice with cornmeal or a little wheat flour gave a soft, moist batter bread in the same family as spoonbread and the Charleston rice bread called philpy. It is credited by name to Mrs. E. S. Cheesebrough, which shows how such compilations worked: the recipes were solicited from contributors, so a Southern-rooted dish could sit a page away from something entirely different. The absence of any oven temperature is normal for the period, when a cook judged a wood- or coal-fired range by hand and by how quickly flour browned.