Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Rice Cake (III)
Rice Cake (III)
Helena Smith.
One cup of white sugar, one cup of rice flour, five eggs, one teaspoonful of any essence preferred; beat all together for twenty minutes; bake half an hour in a moderate oven.
A three-ingredient sponge with no butter, no milk and no chemical leavening — everything depends on the air beaten into the eggs and sugar. Treat it as a foam cake and the short instructions make sense.
- The hinge: the beating is the leaveningNothing else lifts this cake, so the twenty minutes is not padding. In a stand mixer with the whisk, whole eggs and sugar need roughly 8-10 minutes on high, until the mixture is pale, tripled and falls from the whisk in a ribbon that sits on the surface for several seconds. Fold the rice flour in by hand in three additions.
- Rice flour, not sweet rice flourUse finely milled white rice flour. Glutinous or "sweet" rice flour (mochiko) behaves completely differently and will give a dense, gummy result. The cake happens to contain no wheat, which may be part of its appeal to modern readers.
- "A moderate oven"350F. If your pan is deep or you are baking a single thick layer, 325F for a little longer gives a more even rise without a domed, cracked top.
- "Any essence preferred"Essence means extract. Lemon, vanilla, almond or rosewater all suit a plain rice sponge; a teaspoon is the right quantity for modern extracts. Nineteenth-century almond essences were sometimes made from bitter almonds — today's supermarket almond extract is a safe substitute.
- Add saltThe original omits it, as many cake receipts of the period do. A pinch of fine salt folded in with the flour keeps the cake from tasting flatly sweet.
- Pan and donenessAn 8-inch round or a small ungreased tube pan suits the volume; grease and line the bottom of a straight-sided tin, but leave the sides bare so the batter can climb. Half an hour is about right — the cake is done when it springs back and the edges begin to pull away.
- Yield and keepingOne modest 8-inch cake, eight small servings. Fat-free sponges stale quickly; eat it the day it is made, or serve slices with fruit and cream the next day.
Rice flour cakes appear repeatedly in North American and British community cookbooks of the later nineteenth century, often in sets of two or three variants, as here, which probably reflects several contributors sending in their own version of the same idea. The formula is essentially a sponge cake with rice flour standing in for wheat. Such cakes were often praised for a fine, close crumb and described as light and easily digested, a phrase that in period writing is commonly associated with food thought fit for invalids and children. The Home Cook Book was compiled from contributed receipts credited by name, which is why this one arrives under Helena Smith's signature and with no more explanation than she thought her neighbours needed.