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Griddle Cakes
2 cups Flour, 1/2 teaspoonful Salt, 2 Eggs, 2 (scant) cups sour Milk or Buttermilk, 1 even teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda. 1 tablespoonful Butter.
Sift the flour, Soda and salt together several times. Stir into this mixture the sour milk or buttermilk and the eggs well beaten. Make a smooth batter and then pour into it the butter, melted, and bake on a well greased, hot griddle. Serve at once.
BREAKFAST MUFFINS. (Fine) 3 cups Flour, 6 teaspoonfuls Sugar, 4 Eggs, 1 pt. sour Milk, 1 tablespoonful Butter 1 even teaspoonful or Lard, The Great 1 teaspoonful Salt, "Arm & Hammer" Soda.
Sift the flour and salt into a bowl. Beat together the yolks of the eggs with the sugar and melted butter or lard; dissolve The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda in a little lukewarm water, add to sour milk, and pour into bowl with other ingredients. Beat all together and then add the well beaten whites of the eggs. Have muffin tins well greased and heated; fill half full with the batter and bake in a quick oven.
Two recipes share this page: griddle cakes and, below them, breakfast muffins. Both are sour-milk formulas built around baking soda, and both were printed as advertising for it.
- The missing flourThe griddle cake list calls for sifted flour but gives no quantity; it is simply absent from the printed ingredients. With 2 scant cups of sour milk and 2 eggs, roughly 2 cups of flour gives a pourable batter; adjust with milk or flour until it ribbons off the spoon.
- Sour milk is not spoiled milkIn this period the term meant raw milk clabbered naturally. Pasteurized milk left out simply goes bad. Use buttermilk, or acidulate whole milk with 1 tablespoon lemon juice or vinegar per cup and let it stand ten minutes.
- Soda needs the acidOne even teaspoon of soda is calibrated to roughly two cups of buttermilk. Substituting sweet milk leaves the soda unneutralized and the cakes taste soapy and turn yellowish-brown. If you have only sweet milk, use baking powder in a current recipe instead.
- Sift, then work fastThe repeated sifting is the period's substitute for even distribution of soda through the flour. Once the buttermilk hits it the leavening begins immediately — mix, then cook. Batter left standing twenty minutes gives flat cakes.
- Griddle heatA well-greased hot griddle means about 375F; a drop of water should skitter and vanish. Cook two to three minutes until the surface bubbles look dry at the edges, then turn once only.
- "A quick oven" for the muffinsRoughly 400 to 425F; the book gives no temperature. Fill greased tins half full, as directed, and bake about 18 to 20 minutes. Heating the tins before filling, as the recipe says, gives the batter an immediate lift.
- Sugar in the muffinsSix teaspoons is 2 tablespoons across three cups of flour — barely sweet by modern standards. These are breakfast bread meant for butter and preserves, not cupcakes.
- YieldThe griddle cake batter makes about 12 to 14 four-inch cakes. The muffin batter — three cups of flour, a pint of milk and four eggs — is a large batch and will fill considerably more than a single 12-cup tin at half full.
This page comes from one of the small recipe pamphlets that Church & Dwight distributed for decades to teach cooks to use their bicarbonate of soda, sold under the Arm & Hammer mark that belonged from the 1860s onward to James A. Church's firm, Church & Dwight as such being the product of a later merger. The brand name appears in full, in quotation marks, inside the ingredient list itself. Sour-milk baking of this kind was the ordinary American method before commercial baking powder became cheap and reliable: a farm household would often have clabbered milk on hand, and a penny box of soda turned it into leavening. The chemistry is straightforward acid-base neutralization, which is also why these formulas insist on an even teaspoonful rather than a heaping one; excess soda has nothing to react with and announces itself in the taste.<a href="/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#87b3b2b8b7b0f9"></a>