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Griddle Cakes
3 Cupfuls Flour. 4 Teaspoonfuls Baking Powder ¾ Teaspoonful Salt 2 Tablespoonfuls Sugar 1 Pint Milk 1 Egg, Well Beaten 2 Tablespoonfuls Melted Snowdrift Sift together the dry ingredients, then beat in the milk, the egg and the Snowdrift. Drop by tablespoonfuls onto a griddle well oiled with Snowdrift, and when brown on one side and full of holes, turn to brown on the other. Serve with honey, melted jelly, jam, brown sugar syrup, maple syrup, caramel sauce or corn syrup.
A standard early twentieth-century pancake batter from a shortening manufacturer's booklet, with one glaring omission in the printed ingredient list.
- The flour is missingNo flour appears in the list, though the method says to sift together the dry ingredients and the batter is meant to drop by tablespoonfuls. A line has clearly dropped out in printing. Comparable batters of the period use about 2 cups of flour to 1 pint of milk; treat that as an estimate and adjust to a batter that ribbons thickly off the spoon.
- "34 Teaspoonful Salt"Another typesetting casualty: read it as 3/4 teaspoonful. One pint of milk and 2 cups of flour will take that much salt comfortably.
- A pint of milkTwo cups. Whole milk suits this best; the batter has no fat beyond the two spoonfuls of shortening, and skim milk gives a pale, tough cake.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening (hydrogenated in its later formulations), the brand this book was written to sell. Any solid vegetable shortening works, as does melted butter or 2 tablespoons of neutral oil. For greasing the griddle, oil or clarified butter is simpler than melted shortening.
- Baking powderFour teaspoonfuls to roughly 2 cups of flour is a heavier hand than modern practice, which runs nearer a teaspoon per cup of double-acting powder; older single-acting powders were also apt to lose strength on the shelf. Cutting back will avoid a metallic edge.
- Griddle heatAim for 375F, or a surface where a drop of water skitters rather than sits. The recipe's real cue is better than any thermometer: turn when the top is matte and pocked with broken bubbles, and only once.
- Don't beat it smooth"Beat in" notwithstanding, stop while a few lumps remain. Overworked batter develops gluten and the cakes come out rubbery and flat.
- YieldUncertain, since the flour quantity is missing, but a batter of this size dropped by tablespoonfuls will give well over twenty small cakes.
Snowdrift was a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and this book belongs to a genre that flourished from the 1900s through the 1930s: the branded cookbook, given away or sold cheaply to teach cooks to use a new industrial fat in place of lard or butter. Cottonseed oil began as a waste product of the Southern cotton gin and was turned into an edible fat by refining and, after about 1910, hydrogenation; the same technology produced Crisco, Snowdrift's better-remembered rival. The recipe's insistence on Snowdrift three times over in nine lines is the point of the page. Griddle cakes themselves needed no introduction to an American reader, having been a standard breakfast since the days of hearth griddles and pearlash leavening, but the long list of suggested toppings, from maple syrup down to plain corn syrup, is a useful snapshot of what a household of the period actually had in the pantry.