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New York Breakfast Cakes
One quart flour, one pint milk, one teaspoon soda, two teaspoons cream-tarter, one tablespoon sugar, one tablespoon butter, one egg, a little salt.
This is an ingredient list rather than a method, which was normal for a book aimed at cooks who already knew what a breakfast cake was. The proportions read as a griddle or drop batter rather than a stiff dough.
- The measuresA quart of flour is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb or about 450 g, measured by scooping as the period cook would. A pint of milk is 2 cups. The tablespoon of butter is about 1/2 oz melted.
- Soda and cream of tartarTogether these do the work of baking powder: the cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate) reacts with the bicarbonate as soon as liquid arrives. Sift both through the dry flour, then mix and cook promptly, since the lift is single-acting and fades quickly. One teaspoon soda to two of cream of tartar is a common period ratio and is roughly equivalent to about 4 teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder.
- What kind of cakeFour cups flour to two cups milk plus an egg gives a thick, spoonable batter, not a pourable one. As written it suits a hot greased griddle or a well-buttered gem pan; if the batter feels too stiff to spread, thin with milk a tablespoon at a time.
- HeatThe recipe specifies no cooking method. If cooked on a griddle, medium heat until bubbles break across the surface before turning; if baked in gem or muffin pans, a hot oven, around 425F for 15 to 20 minutes, is a reasonable modern starting point.
- Salt"A little salt" against this much flour suggests something on the order of a teaspoon by modern practice. Period butter was commonly salted for keeping, though at one tablespoon its contribution here would be slight.
- SugarOne tablespoon in the whole batch is too little to sweeten and likely serves browning more than flavour.
- YieldExpect roughly 18 to 20 griddle cakes, or about a dozen and a half gems.
Cream of tartar and saleratus mixed at home were the standard chemical leavening of American kitchens through the middle of the nineteenth century, and cooks went on measuring the two separately long after packaged baking powder became widely available in the second half of the century. Recipes of this kind, a bare list of proportions under a place name, were the common currency of community and household cookbooks, where the numbers alone were often taken to be enough. Place-name titles like this one are often said to indicate not a documented origin so much as a style thought fashionable or citified, and "New York" attached to a breakfast cake may signal nothing more than that.