Calas, Creole Rice Fritters (Picayune 1916)

“Belle Cala! Tout Chaud!”

This is the breakfast New Orleans forgot. A yeast-raised rice fritter, sold hot in the street by Creole women who carried them through the French Quarter in a covered bowl balanced on the head, and eaten with the morning café au lait. The book prints the cry as the recipe’s title, which tells you how the dish was known: not by a description, by a sound.

And then it tells you they are already gone. Writing in 1916: “The Cala woman was a daily figure in the streets till within the last two or three years… The Cala women have almost all passed away.” The recipe is credited to “one of the last of the olden Cala women, one who has walked the streets of the French Quarter for fifty years and more.”

Put that next to our beignet page: the pastry New Orleans is now famous for was still being sold as a French Market doughnut until a documented rebrand in 1958. So the fritter the city was famous for was dying while the fritter it is famous for now did not yet have its name.

The diagnostic detail: the rice is fermented overnight with yeast. Not baking powder. That is not a limitation of 1916 — see the notes, because the evidence is sitting right beside it on the page.

UNTESTED.

Ingredients

THE NIGHT BEFORE

• 1/2 cup rice
• 3 cups water, boiling hard
• 1/2 cake compressed yeast (about 1 1/4 tsp active dry), dissolved in 1/2 cup hot water

IN THE MORNING

• 3 eggs, beaten thoroughly
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 3 tablespoons flour — see note, the book omits this from its own ingredient list
• 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg
• TO FRY AND FINISH
• Lard for deep frying
• Powdered white sugar, to sprinkle

TO SERVE

• Café au lait. The book is not making a suggestion.

Directions

Key ingredients

Baking Soda & Baking Powder · Salt

1. Night before — cook the rice to death. Three cups of water at a hard boil. Wash half a cup of rice thoroughly, drain, and put it in. Boil it “till very soft and mushy.” This is the one time you are trying to wreck rice: you want it collapsing, not separate.
2. Cool it, mash it, yeast it, leave it. When cold, mash it well and mix in the yeast dissolved in half a cup of hot water. Set the rice to rise overnight.
3. Morning — eggs, sugar, flour. Beat three eggs thoroughly and work them into the risen rice, mixing and beating well. Add half a cup of sugar and three tablespoonfuls of flour “to make the rice adhere.” Beat it to a thick batter.
4. A second, short rise: fifteen minutes. Then beat in the grated nutmeg.
5. Get the lard right, and the book gives you the test. Enough lard for the cakes to swim in. Drop in a small piece of bread: if it goes golden brown, the fat is ready. “If it burns or browns instantly it is too hot. The golden brown colour is the true test.” A yeasted batter this wet browns fast, and too-hot fat gives you a dark shell over raw rice.
6. Fry by the spoonful, and keep them off the bottom. A large deep spoon, one spoonful at a time, “remembering always that the cake must not touch the bottom of the pan.” Fry to a nice brown. -> photo 1
7. Drain and sugar. Into a colander, or onto heated brown paper. Then a hot dish, sprinkled over with powdered white sugar, eaten hot with café au lait.
8. The street version, which is the same food moving faster: the Cala women took them piping hot from the pan, wrapped them in a clean towel in a basket or bowl, and went out into the morning with them.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t The backbone is The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book, fifth edition, published by The Times-Picayune in New Orleans in 1916 and copyrighted 1901, 1906, 1910 and 1916. The scan is the Cornell University copy, and it is in our Reference Library: library.fubsypoly.com/picayunes-creole-cook-book-1916.pdf I read the quantities off the page images rather than the OCR. The optical text of this book renders every fraction as a hyphenated pair — 1-2 for a half, 1 1-2 for one and a half — and it misread the 5 eggs in Pain Perdu as a letter B. If you go back to the scan yourself, go to the page image. UNTESTED. I have not cooked this version. The measurements are the book’s, converted to modern phrasing but not re-proportioned, and where the original is vague I have said so rather than inventing a number.

⚠ The book leaves the flour out of its own ingredient list The printed list runs: rice, water, eggs, sugar, yeast, nutmeg, powdered sugar, lard. No flour. But the method then calls for “three tablespoonfuls of flour, to make the rice adhere.” I have put the flour into the ingredient list above because you cannot make the recipe without it, and flagged it here rather than silently tidying the original.

⭐ The yeast is a decision, not a limitation — and the proof is on the same page The obvious modern assumption is that calas are yeasted because that is what people had. It is wrong, and you do not have to leave the page to show it. Printed alongside calas on p. 118 are Rice Waffles, Rice Griddle Cakes and Rice Bread — and every one of them calls for baking powder. The book knew baking powder perfectly well, used it three times in the same column, and specified an overnight yeast ferment for calas anyway. So when a modern calas recipe swaps in baking powder for convenience, it is not modernising a primitive method. It is removing the thing that made the fritter distinct from the three batters printed next to it.

Where calas came from The book is careful about attribution in a way worth preserving: the dish was sold “by the ancient Creole negro women in the French Quarter,” and the recipe came from one of the last of them. It records the trade dying and the recipe surviving in domestic memory — “in many an ancient home the good housewife tells her daughters just how ‘Tante Zizi’ made the Calas in her day.” This is one of the places where the book is a primary source about its own moment, not just a set of instructions. It is watching a street trade end.

The name Tout chaud is “all hot” — the cry is “Beautiful calas! Piping hot!” The word cala itself is generally traced to a West African root for rice, which would make the name of the fritter older than French New Orleans. I have not read the linguistic literature first-hand, so take that as the received account rather than something I have checked.

Sourcing and gear Half a cake of compressed yeast is roughly 1 1/4 teaspoons of active dry, or about 9 g of fresh. Long-grain rice is what Louisiana grew and what the book’s rice chapter assumes. Lard is the frying fat in the original and it does taste different from neutral oil here — the fritter is barely sweet and the fat is a real part of the flavour.

Related The rice chapter that precedes this one is the same one that gives Jambalaya à la Créole (Picayune 1916).

Still open Whether calas were ever leavened any other way in the nineteenth century, and how much rice was traditionally leftover rice rather than rice cooked for the purpose. This recipe cooks rice specially; several later versions are explicitly a way of using yesterday’s.