Rice Puffs
Put one pint of cold boiled rice in a bowl, add to it one cupful of milk and three well beaten eggs, one tablespoonful of butter melted, a teaspoonful of baking powder, one teaspoonful of sugar, a dash of salt and sufficient flour to make a thick drop batter. Drop by spoonfuls into smoking hot fat and cook until well browned. Drain on unglazed paper and dust with powdered sugar.
A leftover-rice fritter, thickened just enough to hold its shape in the fat. The batter's consistency is the whole game.
- "A thick drop batter"The flour is unmeasured because the wetness of the boiled rice varies. Add flour a couple of tablespoons at a time until a spoonful of batter holds a rounded shape and falls reluctantly from the spoon. Too thin and the puffs flatten and soak fat; too thick and the centres stay raw.
- One pint of cold boiled riceMeasured by volume, about 2 cups cooked rice, which is roughly 2/3 cup raw. The rice is specified cold, which also means drier and better able to hold together. Rice held at room temperature for hours should not be used, as cooked rice supports Bacillus cereus; refrigerate it promptly and use within a day or two.
- "Smoking hot fat"In a kitchen of this period this meant lard or beef drippings in a deep pot. Aim for 365-375F on a thermometer. Modern refined oils smoke well above frying temperature, so the visual cue no longer applies -- go by the number.
- Frying in batchesDrop only five or six at a time. Crowding drops the oil temperature and gives greasy puffs. They will usually turn themselves once puffed; if not, roll them with a spoon so both sides brown.
- Doneness"Well browned" is the outside; the inside needs three to four minutes total. Break one open before frying the rest — an underdone centre of eggy rice batter is the common failure here.
- Unglazed paperMeaning butcher's or brown paper, used because it absorbs fat. Paper towels on a rack do the same job; a rack alone is better still, since draining on a flat surface steams the undersides.
- Baking powderPowders of this period were often single-acting, releasing their gas on wetting rather than in the heat. A level teaspoon of modern baking powder is ample for this amount of batter.
- Yield and servingPerhaps eighteen to twenty-four walnut-sized puffs, depending on how much flour the batter takes; enough for four to six. Dust with confectioners' sugar while still warm so it clings, and serve immediately -- they collapse and toughen as they cool.
Rice puffs belong to a large family of nineteenth-century fritters built on cooked leftovers: in a household that boiled rice as a starch alongside meat, yesterday's pot became the next day's fried batter. Rice was cheap, shelf-stable and widely available in American kitchens, so cookbooks of the period are thick with ways to use it up -- croquettes, griddle cakes, puddings, waffles. The technique is older than the book by centuries; dropping a leavened batter into deep fat and dusting it with sugar is essentially the method behind beignets and the Italian frittelle di riso traditionally eaten at St. Joseph's Day. What marks this version as its own moment is the baking powder, a chemical leavener that spread rapidly through American home cooking in the closing decades of the century.