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Flour Griddle Cakes
One quart of butter milk or sour milk, one dessert spoon melted butter, one egg, one teaspoon soda dissolved in hot water, a little salt. You may need more soda, this depends upon the condition of the milk, add sifted flour enough to make a batter, not very stiff. If wanted for breakfast mix night before: if for supper, mix early in the morning. It is a mistake some make in stirring these cakes and baking at once.
A large, loose buttermilk batter from the era when sour milk did the leavening work. The recipe is deliberately vague about flour because the cook was expected to judge by eye.
- The hinge: let it standThe final line is the whole point of the recipe. A rested batter hydrates the flour and lets the gluten relax, giving a tender cake rather than a tough one. Mix it, cover it, and refrigerate rather than leaving it out overnight as written.
- Dessert spoonA dessert spoon sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, roughly 2 teaspoons. Melted butter at that quantity in a quart of batter is a light touch, mostly for browning.
- QuantitiesA quart is 4 cups of buttermilk, which makes a very large batch, roughly 24 to 30 cakes of four inches. Halve it for a household of two or three.
- Flour, unspecifiedTo bring a quart of buttermilk to a batter that pours in a thick ribbon takes somewhere near 3 1/2 to 4 cups of flour. Add it in stages and stop when it mounds briefly on the spoon before settling.
- Soda and modern buttermilkOne teaspoon of soda per quart is the starting point, and the recipe is right that sharply soured milk needs more. Commercial cultured buttermilk is milder and more consistent than the farm sour milk intended here, so err on the low side and increase cautiously; excess soda tastes soapy and turns the cakes yellow-brown.
- Sour milk substitutionIf you have no buttermilk, milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup will leaven, but it lacks the body of the original and the batter will be thinner. Adjust with flour.
- "Baking" the cakesNineteenth-century books use bake for griddle cooking. A heavy pan or griddle at about 375F, lightly greased, cooking until the bubbles at the edges set and stay open before turning.
- Adding the sodaIf the batter has rested overnight, hold back the soda and beat it in, dissolved in a little hot water, just before cooking. Soda spends most of its lift within minutes of meeting acid.
Before baking powder became a reliable pantry staple, the standard American leavening was an acid and an alkali met at the last moment: sour milk or buttermilk against saleratus, a name that covered potassium bicarbonate before sodium bicarbonate — baking soda — displaced it. Farm kitchens had sour milk constantly, as the by-product of butter-making or simply of milk left standing, and its acidity varied by the day, which is why this recipe declines to fix the soda and tells the cook to judge instead. The overnight rest may reflect a related habit, and it has been suggested that it carries over from the older tradition of yeast-raised buckwheat and flour cakes kept in a batter crock by the stove and replenished each night; whether the fermentation had by this point faded and left only the practice of mixing ahead is conjecture. The writer clearly regarded skipping it as the mark of a careless cook.