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Sour Milk Griddle Cakes
2½ cups flour. 1 teaspoon salt. 1 tablespoon Cottolene. 2 cups rich sour milk. 1¼ teaspoons soda. 1 egg lightly beaten.
PROCESS: Mix and sift flour, salt and soda. Add sour milk and beat to a smooth batter. Add Cottolene and well-beaten egg; continue beating until ingredients are thoroughly blended. Batter should be smooth and creamy. Drop by spoonsful on well-greased, hot griddle; grease griddle with melted Cottolene. Cook on one side and, when light and covered with bubbles, turn and cook on the other side.
A plain sour-milk pancake batter from a book underwritten by a shortening manufacturer. Two substitutions and one questionable measurement are all that stand between it and a modern breakfast.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which paid for this book. Use melted butter, a neutral oil, or vegetable shortening in the same amount; for greasing the griddle, clarified butter or oil behaves the same way.
- Rich sour milkRaw milk left to clabber naturally — thick, tangy, and slightly acidic. Cultured buttermilk is the direct replacement, cup for cup. Milk soured with vinegar or lemon juice will work but gives a thinner batter and less flavor; do not use milk that has simply spoiled in a modern refrigerator.
- The soda measurement is suspectA quarter teaspoon of soda gives little neutralising power or lift against two cups of sour milk, and the printed plural, "1/4 teaspoons," hints that a digit has been dropped. Sour-milk batters of this size usually carry closer to a teaspoon or more. If you follow the printed amount you are likely to get flat, sour cakes.
- Griddle heatAim for about 375F — a drop of water should skitter and evaporate in a second or two. Too cool and the cakes go leathery before the bubbles set; too hot and the outside colors before the soda has finished working.
- Mix and cook promptlyThe soda begins reacting with the acid in the milk the moment they meet. Beat only until smooth and get the batter onto the griddle; a batter that sits half an hour will have spent its rise.
- TurningThe instruction to wait until the surface is "covered with bubbles" is the real cue — the bubbles indicate the leavening has worked through the cake. Turn once only.
- YieldAbout sixteen cakes of three to four inches, enough for four people.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was published by the N. K. Fairbank Company to promote Cottolene, a shortening made from cottonseed oil and beef suet that the firm advertised heavily from the 1890s as a cheaper, more "wholesome" replacement for lard — which explains why Cottolene turns up throughout the book, including in a pancake batter that scarcely needs it. Sour-milk griddle cakes themselves long predate the advertising: before commercial baking powder was cheap and reliable, cooks relied on the acid in naturally clabbered milk reacting with saleratus or soda for leavening, and a household with a milk cow always had souring milk on hand to use up. The book is structured as one full Sunday dinner per week of the year.