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Rice Cake
Mrs. Bendelari.
Half a pound of sugar, half a pound of flour, six eggs, one teaspoon vanilla; break in the eggs on the flour and sugar, whip for half an hour with the back of a dinner knife; bake twenty minutes in a moderate oven,
A no-leavening sponge in the old style: everything depends on how much air you beat into the eggs. The instructions are terse even by 1876 standards, so a few things need filling in.
- The missing riceThe title says rice cake but the ingredient list says only "flour." Nineteenth-century rice cake often meant a sponge made with rice flour, sometimes half rice and half wheat; other versions used boiled rice. Made with plain wheat flour it is simply a pound-style sponge; with rice flour it bakes drier and paler.
- Weights to volumeHalf a pound of sugar is about 1 1/8 cups granulated. Half a pound of all-purpose flour is roughly 1 3/4 cups scooped and levelled. Weigh if you can, since the whole structure rests on the ratio.
- Half an hour of beatingThis is the hinge. There is no baking powder or soda, so the only lift comes from air whipped into whole eggs and sugar. A stand mixer on high reaches the same place in 8 to 12 minutes: the batter should triple, turn pale, and fall from the whisk in a ribbon that sits on the surface for several seconds before sinking.
- The back of a dinner knifeA broad flat blade was one of the beating tools used in kitchens without a wire whisk or rotary egg-beater. It aerates slowly compared with a whisk, which may be why the recipe budgets half an hour.
- Order of mixingBreaking eggs directly onto flour and sugar and beating the lot together is the old all-in-one method. For a more reliable rise, whip eggs and sugar to the ribbon first, then sift the flour over in three additions and fold; the vanilla goes in at the end.
- A moderate oven350F. Sponges of this kind are unforgiving of a hot oven, which sets the crust before the interior has risen.
- Pan and timingTwenty minutes suits a shallow layer: two 8-inch rounds or a quarter-sheet, baked until the top springs back. In a single deep tin the same batter needs 35 to 45 minutes and will likely sink in the middle.
- YieldRoughly a two-layer 8-inch cake, 10 to 12 slices. It is dry by design, and cakes of this type were commonly served with fruit, cream or wine.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago, first published 1874, with later editions through the 1870s) was compiled from contributions by named local women and sold to raise money for the Chicago Home for the Friendless, which is why so many of its entries carry a surname and almost no instruction — presumably Mrs. Bendelari could assume her readers already knew what a sponge batter should look like. Rice flour cakes were a standing feature of nineteenth-century baking on both sides of the Atlantic. The half-hour of beating is the real record here: it points to a kitchen where the rotary egg-beater, patented in various forms from the 1850s onward, had not yet displaced the flat knife blade.