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Philpy
1/2 pint (I cup) cold boiled rice 1 pint (2 cups) cornmeal 1/2 pint (I cup) milk 2 eggs 2 tablespoonfuls melted butter ½ teaspoonful salt 1 Put the rice into a basin; add the cornmeal, milk, eggs well beaten, melted butter and salt.
Beat together for five minutes, and spread the batter, not too thick, in buttered baking-tins.
Cakes Bake in a moderate oven until ready. Break the bread in pieces, split, butter, and serve hot.
A Lowcountry rice bread that has come through the printer with a few scars: the letter "I" stands in for the numeral 1 throughout, and the words "Cakes" and "Break the bread in pieces" are stray fragments of neighbouring entries. What survives is workable, with one proportion worth questioning.
- The suspect measurementTwo cups of cornmeal against one cup of milk and two eggs gives a stiff paste, not a batter you can spread. Nineteenth-century Carolina versions use roughly half as much rice flour as cooked rice; if you follow the printed quantities, expect to add milk until the mixture drops thickly from the spoon.
- Beat the rice to a pasteThe five minutes of beating is the hinge. The cold boiled rice has to break down into the batter so the finished bread is moist and close-grained rather than lumpy. A stand mixer with the paddle, or a few pulses in a food processor before the meal goes in, does it faster.
- Cold rice, and softUse plain long-grain or Carolina rice boiled soft and thoroughly chilled. Firm, separate-grained pilaf rice will not mash into the batter, and warm rice will slacken it.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; 'moderate' is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F. A shallow, well-buttered 8- or 9-inch cake tin or a small sheet pan; the batter should go in about half an inch deep. Reckon roughly 25 to 35 minutes, until set through and browned at the edges.
- "1/2 pint (1 cup)"The book's pint is 16 fluid ounces, so its half-pint is a standard cup. No conversion needed beyond reading past the typography.
- BasinA mixing bowl. Nothing more specialised is meant.
- SaltOne and a half teaspoons in this volume of batter is on the assertive side for modern palates, particularly with salted butter. A teaspoon is ample.
- Yield and servingEnough for four to six as a bread at the table. It is meant to be cut or broken while hot, split, buttered and eaten at once; it stiffens badly as it cools and is not worth keeping overnight.
Philpy is a Charleston bread, one of a family of Lowcountry batter breads built on cold cooked rice — the byproduct of a region that grew and ate rice daily and wasted none of it. Versions appear in nineteenth-century Carolina cookery, most famously in Sarah Rutledge's The Carolina Housewife (1847), where it sits among a number of other rice breads. The name's origin is genuinely unsettled; no documented derivation stands up, and the spelling varies from book to book. Its appearance in a general American collection like this one, with cornmeal in place of the rice flour of the Carolina versions, shows the dish drifting away from its home kitchen — recognisable, but no longer quite itself.