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Sour Milk Griddle Cakes
2 cupfuls flour 1 tablespoonful melted Crisco 2 cupfuls sour milk 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1 egg 1 tablespoonful sugar Sift dry ingredients, add milk, well beaten egg, and melted Crisco. Drop by spoonfuls on hot griddle, greased with Crisco. Cook until browned, then turn and cook on other side. Serve hot with syrup.
Sufficient for eighteen cakes.
A plain sour-milk pancake batter from a Crisco promotional cookbook, and it works as written provided you understand what "sour milk" meant in a kitchen without a refrigerator.
- Sour milk means clabbered milk, not spoiled milkIn 1915 this was raw or unpasteurized milk left to turn naturally acidic and thicken. Pasteurized milk left on the counter today simply rots rather than souring cleanly. Use cultured buttermilk, or 2 cups milk with 2 tablespoons lemon juice or white vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- The acid is doing the leaveningThere is no baking powder here. The teaspoon of soda reacts with the acid in the milk, so the batter starts working the moment it is mixed. Cook it within about fifteen minutes; a batter left to stand will have spent its lift.
- Mix as little as possibleSift the flour, salt, soda and sugar together, then add the wet ingredients and stir only until the flour disappears. Lumps are fine. Beating develops gluten and gives tough, flat cakes.
- CriscoThe all-vegetable shortening the book exists to sell, and still sold. Melted butter or a neutral oil substitutes at the same volume in the batter. For greasing the griddle, a thin film of oil wiped on with paper towel gives more even browning than a spoonful of anything.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 375F on an electric griddle. A drop of water should skitter and evaporate rather than sit and steam. Turn when the surface bubbles have broken and the edges look dry, roughly two minutes, then about a minute on the second side.
- Batter consistencyTwo cups of liquid to two cups of flour gives a fairly thin batter that spreads into wide, tender cakes. If your buttermilk is very thick, the cakes will be smaller and puffier; thin with a splash of milk if you want them to spread.
- YieldEighteen cakes, as stated, at roughly three inches each. That is four modest servings, or three generous ones.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which had been introduced in 1911 as the first widely marketed all-vegetable shortening. That accounts for the tablespoon of Crisco in the batter and the instruction to grease the griddle with it too, where an older cookbook would have said lard, drippings or butter. The recipe itself is much older than the fat: sour-milk griddle cakes were standard in American households before refrigeration, when milk that had turned was an everyday resource rather than a loss, and its acidity was the reliable partner to saleratus and later to baking soda. The pairing predates commercial baking powder and survived alongside it because the sour milk gives a tang and a tenderness that sweet milk and powder do not.