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Rice Cake (IV)
Mrs. Mackie.
Six eggs, one cup of white sugar, two cups of ground rice; beaten thoroughly. ; beaten thoroughly.
This is a bare-bones sponge formula of the sort written down for cooks who already knew what to do with it: three ingredients, no fat, no leavening, no oven note, and no baking time. The typesetting has also doubled the phrase "beaten thoroughly." Everything below is what the original assumes you know.
- Ground rice is rice flourNineteenth-century "ground rice" is rice milled to a flour, somewhat coarser than the fine white rice flour sold today. It contains no gluten, so the cake's entire structure comes from the eggs.
- The hinge: the eggs are the leaveningWith no baking powder and no butter, the only lift is air beaten into the eggs. Whites and yolks are best whipped separately, the yolks with the sugar to a pale ribbon, the whites to soft peaks, then the rice folded in last with a light hand. Beating the flour in hard collapses the foam and gives a dense, sandy slab.
- Two cups of ground rice is a lot of flourAgainst six eggs and one cup of sugar this is a stiff, close-grained batter by modern sponge standards. As written it bakes up firm and dry, closer to a shortbread-textured tea cake than a fluffy sponge.
- No oven temperature is givenThe recipe carries no oven note at all. Egg sponges of the period were generally directed into a "moderate" oven, a term this recipe does not use, and one usually taken today to mean somewhere around 325-350F. A rice sponge in a lined 8- or 9-inch tin will want roughly 35 to 45 minutes; test with a skewer rather than trusting a clock.
- No pan is named eitherA single round tin, a loaf tin, or small patty pans would all suit this batter. Grease and flour well, or line with paper; a fat-free rice batter grips a bare tin badly.
- Flavouring is missing by convention, not by designFlavouring is absent -- Rice cake recipes of the period commonly call for lemon zest, a spoon of brandy, rosewater or nutmeg; this one specifies none. Plain, the cake tastes chiefly of egg and sugar.
- YieldRoughly one 8-inch cake, eight to ten small slices. It stales dry rather than soft, so it is best eaten within a day or two.
Rice flour cakes run through English and American cookery from the eighteenth century onward, and this book gives several of them, which tells you how common the format was in a Victorian household repertoire. Ground rice was cheap, was often said to keep better than wheat flour with its germ, and produced a close, slightly gritty crumb that was thought delicate and easy on the stomach; rice puddings and rice cakes were standard invalid and nursery cookery for exactly that reason. That such cakes happen to be free of wheat was incidental at the time, though it is why they are hunted up today. The attribution to Mrs. Mackie is typical of The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in the 1870s from contributions of named local women and sold to raise funds for the Hospital for Sick Children; the recipes were printed largely as submitted, which is why so many, like this one, assume the reader already knows the oven.