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Rice Cakes
One-quarter pound rice flour, two eggs, half ounce powdered sugar, half pint cold milk and half ounce baking powder. Place all the ingredients except the powder in a bowl, sharply mix with a whisk for five minutes, then add the baking powder and gently mix for one minute.
Lightly butter a large frying pan, making four cakes at a time each two and a half inches in diameter. Cook for one and a half minutes on each side. Lift with a skimmer; place on a hot dish. Proceed the same with the other and serve very hot with maple syrup separately.
A plain rice-flour griddle cake, naturally wheat-free, thin enough to spread on its own in the pan. Two things need attention before you start: the leavening is heavy by modern standards, and the batter separates on standing.
- The baking powder is the hingeHalf an ounce is roughly 3½ teaspoons for only 4 oz of flour — around three times what a modern cook would use, and enough to leave a soapy, metallic edge. One to one and a half teaspoons is plenty.
- Weights to volumeA quarter pound of rice flour is roughly ¾ cup to a scant cup, depending on the grind; weigh it if you can. Half an ounce of powdered sugar is about 2 tablespoons of confectioners' sugar or 1 tablespoon granulated.
- Half a pint of milkIn an American book, 1 cup (8 fl oz). If you are working from British measures it is 10 fl oz. Start with a cup; the batter should pour like thin cream.
- Rice flour behaves differentlyThere is no gluten, so the five minutes of sharp whisking is aerating rather than developing anything. The flour also settles fast — stir the bowl between batches or the last cakes will be milk and the first ones sand.
- SkimmerA flat perforated lifter. A slotted fish spatula does the job; these cakes are fragile until set and do not take kindly to a heavy turner.
- Pan heat and timingA minute and a half a side means a medium pan, around 350F on an electric griddle. Rice flour browns more slowly than wheat, so judge by the set edges and the bubbles rather than colour alone.
- Size and yieldTwo-and-a-half-inch cakes, four to a pan, gives roughly a dozen from this batter — two servings at breakfast, three if there is other food on the table.
- ServingMaple syrup passed separately, as written, is the point: these cakes are barely sweet on their own and are meant to carry it.
Rice flour appears throughout Anglo-American cookery of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a cheap, fine-textured alternative to wheat — in puddings, in shortbread-like biscuits, and in griddle cakes like this one. It was also often recommended among the flours thought suitable for invalids and small children, on the old belief that it was more easily digested. This particular formula, with its precise ounce weights and its instruction to serve the syrup separately, reads like professional kitchen shorthand rather than home cooking: quantities by scale, batch size fixed by what fits the pan, and the garnish sent out on its own dish.