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Rice Cakes
To make rice cakes, put a pint of hot boiled rice in a pint of milk and let them soak together over night if more convenient. In the morning sift into a bowl a pint of flour, in which a teaspoonful of baking powder has been sifted; add to the rice and milk half teaspoonful of salt. Beat the mixture, add two eggs and another cup of milk. The grains of rice must be separated in the batter, and it must be beaten each time the cakes are fried. Try the cakes, and if they are too thick, add more milk. They should be about a quarter of an inch thick.
THE HOMINY GRIDDLE CAKE OF THE SOUTH.
For hominy griddle cakes, stir a pint of thin boiled hominy hot from the fire, into a pint of milk. Sift a teaspoonful of baking powder and a half teaspoonful of salt into a pint of flour. If the hominy is very thin, it may need more flour. Add the sifted flour to the milk and hominy. Beat the batter well, add two well beaten eggs and beat it again. Serve the cakes with maple syrup.
Two batters on one page, both built on the same principle: cooked starch loosened with milk, then bound with a modest amount of flour and egg. Neither needs precision so much as attention to consistency.
- Pints, plainlyA pint is 2 cups. So: 2 cups cooked rice, 2 cups milk to soak, 2 cups flour, then another cup of milk at the end. That last cup makes a batter that pours rather than mounds.
- Soak in the refrigeratorThe recipe offers the overnight soak as a convenience ('if more convenient'); its purpose is to let the grains soften and swell. If you do soak overnight, cover and refrigerate, since a bowl of milk left at room temperature will sour.
- Separate the grainsThis is the instruction that matters. Rice straight from the pot clumps, and a clump fries as a lump. Break the mass apart with a fork or your fingers while it soaks, and beat the batter again before each round, since the rice sinks between batches.
- Baking powder timingModern double-acting baking powder tolerates a wait, but the batter is best used within an hour of mixing. Add the powder with the flour in the morning, as written, never to the overnight soak.
- "Hominy" here means grits"Thin boiled hominy hot from the fire" is a loose hominy-grits porridge, not the whole canned kernels sold as hominy today. Cook grits with extra water so they pour, and use them hot so they slacken into the milk instead of setting.
- Griddle heatMedium, lightly greased. The recipe gives no temperature. These batters are heavier than plain flour pancakes and want a slower, steadier heat so the interior sets before the outside colors.
- Thickness and yieldThickness -- A quarter inch is thin by current habit, and correct: thicker cakes stay gummy in the middle. The recipe gives no yield.
Griddle cakes stretched with cooked cereal were a thrift measure that outlived thrift. Leftover rice or the tail end of a pot of grits went into the morning batter rather than the slop bucket, and the result -- softer, moister, faintly sweet -- was liked well enough to be recorded as a dish in its own right. The heading "The Hominy Griddle Cake of the South" marks the regional split: hominy grits were a Southern breakfast staple, while rice cakes appear more widely. Both recipes use chemical leavening, which by this date had largely displaced saleratus and sour milk; whether the overnight soak descends from an older yeast-raised batter is speculation -- as written it serves only to soften the rice.