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Rice Flour Cake
Mrs. Howe.
Ten eggs, one pound of sugar, one pound of rice flour ; flavour with lemon; beat the eggs and sugar half an hour, then add the flour.
A whole-egg sponge with no butter and no chemical leavening — everything depends on the air you beat into the eggs. The original gives no pan and no oven, so those are supplied below.
- The hinge: the beatingHalf an hour of hand-beating built a foam stiff enough to lift a pound of flour. With a stand mixer on medium-high, whole eggs and sugar need roughly 8 to 12 minutes — the mixture should triple in volume, turn pale, and fall from the whisk in a ribbon that sits on the surface for several seconds. Underbeat and the cake is a dense slab.
- Rice flour, not sweet rice flourUse fine white rice flour. Glutinous or "sweet" rice flour (mochiko) behaves completely differently and will give a chewy, gummy result.
- Weights, not cupsA pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; a pound of fine rice flour is roughly 3 1/3 cups, though it varies by grind. Weigh both — this is a formula built on equal weights, and cup measures will throw it off.
- Adding the flourSift the rice flour and fold it in by hand in three or four additions. Rice flour is heavy and drops straight to the bottom if it is dumped in or beaten in with the machine.
- Flavouring with lemonIn this period that would mean grated zest or a few drops of lemon extract. Zest of one to two lemons is right for this quantity; juice adds liquid to a batter that depends on the foam, so zest or extract is the safer choice.
- Pan and ovenTen eggs and a pound each of sugar and flour is a large batter — a 10-inch tube pan or two 9-inch loaf pans. The original specifies no oven; bake at 325-350F for 45 to 60 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back. Grease the pan lightly; there is no fat in the batter itself.
- Texture and keepingRice flour gives a fine, slightly sandy crumb rather than the springy chew of wheat sponge. It stales quickly, so serve it within a day or two, or with fruit and cream. The cake is naturally gluten-free.
- YieldAbout 16 to 20 slices.
Rice flour cakes appear steadily in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, and the technique is older still: an egg-foam batter with no butter and no leavening is often traced to the Renaissance biscuit and pan di Spagna tradition, where beaten eggs did all the lifting. Rice flour was a familiar pantry item in the period, and it was valued both for its fine crumb and as a supposedly light, digestible flour for invalids and children. This particular version comes from The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1874), generally described as one of the earliest American compiled charity cookbooks, in which named contributors — here Mrs. Howe — submitted family receipts in the telegraphic style of a cook writing for other cooks: the ingredients, the crucial beating time, and nothing else, since every reader was assumed to know what a moderate oven felt like.