Mom's Rice Cakes

A few days ago, my friend Kim asked us to describe a favorite childhood meal. My friends mentioned things like fried chicken or pork chops, and I casually mentioned that my mom made rice cakes.

Sara: "What...is that?"

Me: "What are rice cakes?"

Jackie: "You mean those hard things you toast and slather peanut butter on?"

Renne: "Or do you mean something like arancini?"

Me: "My mom takes leftover rice, mixes it with an egg and a little bit of flour, and fries it into little rice fritters that she dumps a lot of salt on. This isn't something that other people's moms do? I assumed it was like a regular mom dish."

In discussing it with other friend groups this week, it turns out that nobody's mom made these. I was asked a few times if I meant arancini, but these didn't have a breadcrumb coating, and they weren't round. They were like little patties, crispy on the edges and soft in the middle, and each time I explained them nobody seemed to know what I was talking about.

I was surprised by this, because my mom's rice cakes are the meal I remember best from childhood.

My mom is a good cook, but my mom is also a home cook, which means that a lot of her recipes involve pinches, dashes, and just knowing by looking if something is the right consistency or if it needs a little more flour. She makes lots of things well, and many nights she made two dinners because I was such a picky eater, so I remember getting a lot of things that were variations on other things: white pizza, sauceless lasagna, spaghetti with olive oil and garlic instead of red sauce, etc. I remember the rice cakes as a treat, though, something we usually only got on weekends and not every weekend. In my head, my mom made them out of leftover rice from dinner, but I think she actually made rice just to make these.

Last time I attempted to make these was in 2007, and they did not come out as well as I remember Mom's. In retrospect, I overanalyzed Mom's recipe, and tried to make it exact when it's not really an exact sort of process. Ten years later, I am a better, more confident cook, so I decided to ask Mom for the recipe again and give these another try.

Now that I have, here's an updated recipe, which I have been given permission to share:

2 cups of cooked rice (however much one cup of uncooked rice makes)
2 eggs, beaten
3 tablespoons of flour
a pinch of sugar
a pinch of salt

Leave the salt container out, because you're going to need it again.

1) Put your rice in a bowl.



If you have a Pyrex bowl of any sort, that's best, but if you don't then just use whatever mixing bowl you have.

2) Mix everything together.



I mixed the eggs, sugar, and salt in first, then mixed the flour in after.

3) Heat 1/8-1/4 of an inch of oil in a frying pan with decently high sides. The oil is going to spit a little, and you don't want it all over the stovetop. I set the heat exactly between medium and high. You want these to get crispy on the edges, but not so hot that they brown too fast.

4) Spoon the rice mixture into the oil and use the back of the spoon to flatten it. It should look like a little patty.



5) When the edges look golden brown, turn it over and let it cook for about another minute. (It won't take as long as the first side because that side partially cooked while the other side was cooking, like pancakes do.)

6) Using a slotted spatula, remove it from the oil, let it drain for a few seconds, and then put it on a plate that's covered in paper towels and immediately sprinkle salt on top.



7) Now that you've built up your confidence by doing it right one time, start making more than one at once.



It makes about this many rice cake, plus two that I ate while I was making the others:



If you're trying to cut salt out of your diet, try adding something to the batter to flavor these, like chives or a spice blend.

Also, eat them while they're still warm, or room temperature. If you put them in the fridge to get cold, they get kind of gummy, and I have no idea how to reheat these.

rice cakes, sort of like mom used to make

After yesterday’s pesto mayo non-recipe, I felt like I should actually cook something to prove that I can, and sometimes do, actually cook. (I’m not sure who I felt that I needed to prove this to, but I felt it anyway.) Yesterday I made Tai peanut chicken on white rice for lunch (the complicated recipe included cooking the chicken and pouring Thai peanut sauce from a bottle onto it and the rice), and made way more rice than I actually needed, so I decided that I would make Mom’s Rice Cakes with the leftovers.

When we were little, my mom would, when the urge hit her, make rice cakes on the weekends, a big batch of them, and they were great because you could eat them hot and salted, right out of the pan, but later the leftover ones were just as good cold from the fridge. Like so many things, mom did so effortlessly that it never occurred to me until years later that she had to make rice first, season it, watch it, and keep children entertained at the same time. If she made them on a Saturday, the entertainment part was taken care of, and now that I think of it we were much more likely to get them on Saturday than on Sunday, what with church and all.

Anyway, I called mom yesterday to get the recipe, and found out that there isn’t really a recipe. After much back and forth (“How big a pinch? Like a big pinch or a dash pinch?” “What kind of cookies? Chocolate chip, no-bake, or oatmeal raisin?” “Enough to cover the bottom of the pan and float them, or enough to just cover the bottom and a little more? Like a quarter inch? An eighth? A half inch of oil?”), I ended up with this:

1 egg for every cup of rice
1 dash of sugar
1 dash of salt
1 dash of pepper
Enough flour to bind it together until it’s a consistency between oatmeal raisin cookie and chocolate chip cookie dough

So I dumped the rice in a bowl and got started:



The adding flour part was tricky. For some strange reason I don’t have a set of measuring cups. I usually just use my two glass measuring cups for wet and dry ingredients, but I’d already beaten the eggs with a fork in one of them and the other was in the dishwasher from yesterday, so I had to guess at the flour. I have no idea how many spoons I used, but when I could scoop out a lump of dough and it held together I figured that was enough, and got ready to fry.





Frying turned out to be the worst part. First, I didn’t realize that I needed to flatten the dough balls after I dropped them in the pan, so the first three were kind of like rice biscuits or dumplings. Once I realized that they weren’t going to sink on their own, like cookies do, I flattened the next batch, and they became the right shape. The color was a whole other matter. They should, based on memory, be a kind of pastel lemon yellow, like a pale mustard or light buttercup yellow. Getting them that color on one side, flipping them, and getting the same color on the other side was a trick that I mastered maybe three times out of over a dozen cakes.



How the hell did mom do that right every time? Did she just never make a mistake, or did the mistakes go right from the pan and into the dog’s mouth? They tasted fine, but they’re not supposed to be brown.

Also, the oil was spitting a little by the end, which was my fault for not watching the temperature, and I got a little burned spot on my finger that seems fine until something touches it, and then it hurts like hell.