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Batter Cakes
Make a batter of one quart each of flour and sour milk, three eggs beaten separately, a table-spoon of butter, and two level teaspoons soda. Pulverize the soda very fine before measuring, then thoroughly mix with the flour. Add whites of eggs just before baking on the griddle. Sweet milk may be used (with the other ingredients in same quantity) with Horsford's Bread Preparation, one measure each of soda and acid, which must be thoroughly mixed with the flour. These may also be made without eggs.
A plain buttermilk pancake batter scaled for a farm table, with a period alternative for cooks who had a two-part chemical leaven on the shelf. The proportions are given by volume, and that matters more than usual here.
- A quart of flour is not a poundFlour was measured by volume in this book: a quart is 4 cups, roughly 17-18 oz unsifted all-purpose. With 4 cups of sour milk that gives a thin, pourable batter that spreads on the griddle rather than mounding.
- Sour milk means buttermilkThe original assumed raw milk left to clabber. Modern pasteurized milk spoils without souring usefully, so use cultured buttermilk, cup for cup. The acid is what the soda reacts with, so it is not optional.
- Sift the soda into the flourThe instruction to pulverize before measuring and mix thoroughly with the flour is the hinge of the recipe. Soda of the period was often lumpy, and an undissolved lump leaves a bitter, discoloured spot in the finished cake. Sifting the soda with the flour twice does the same job.
- Horsford's Bread PreparationAn early phosphate leaven sold in two packets, an acid phosphate and a soda, to be measured out in equal parts by the cook. It has no modern equivalent on the shelf; a double-acting baking powder does the same work in one ingredient, about 4 teaspoons for this quantity of flour, with sweet milk.
- Whites at the last minuteYolks go in with the milk and butter; the whites are whipped to soft peaks and folded in just before the first cake goes on. Batter left standing after the whites are added deflates and the later cakes will be flatter than the first.
- Griddle heatMedium, about 375F, lightly greased. The cake is ready to turn when the surface bubbles have broken and the edges look dry.
- YieldThis makes roughly 30 to 36 four-inch cakes. Halving or quartering it is sensible for a modern household, and the batter does not keep well once leavened.
Sour-milk batter cakes were a familiar griddle cake in nineteenth-century American cookery, and books of the Buckeye Cookery family print them as a matter of course. The alternative given here is the interesting part. Horsford's Bread Preparation was the commercial acid-phosphate leaven developed by the Harvard chemist Eben Horsford, sold as two separate powders that the cook combined in equal measure, and its appearance in a home cookbook of this date catches the moment when packaged chemical leavens were displacing the sour-milk-and-saleratus method they were designed to imitate. Within a generation single-can baking powder had won, and the instruction to measure "one measure each of soda and acid" became unintelligible to anyone without the tins in front of them.