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Bread Cakes
Take stale bread and soak over night in sour milk; in the morning rub through a colander, and to one quart add the yolks of two eggs, one tea-spoon salt, one tea-spoon soda, two table-spoons sugar, and flour enough to make a batter a little thicker than for buckwheat cakes; add last the well-beaten whites of the eggs, and bake.
A thrift recipe that turns a loaf's worth of dry ends into breakfast. The measurements refer to the soaked pulp, not the dry bread, which is the main thing to get right.
- "One quart" means the pulpSoak the stale bread until it collapses, then push it through a colander or sieve and measure a quart of that puree. The amount of dry bread and milk needed will vary with the loaf; soak generously and measure the pulp rather than the bread.
- Sour milkThis is naturally clabbered raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Cultured buttermilk is the direct substitute; a quart of ordinary milk with two tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in also works, though it will be thinner in body.
- SodaOne teaspoon of soda to a quart of soured pulp is on the generous side by current practice. If your buttermilk is only mildly acidic there may be soda left unreacted, which can taste soapy; a slightly scant teaspoon is safer, and mix it in just before cooking.
- "Bake" means griddleIn nineteenth-century American books, baking a cake of this kind usually means cooking it on a hot greased griddle or spider over the fire. The recipe gives no heat; use a moderate griddle and turn once when the surface bubbles set.
- Batter thicknessThe recipe asks for a batter a little thicker than buckwheat, so aim for something that spreads only reluctantly. The soaked crumb cannot develop any structure of its own, so add the flour a few spoonfuls at a time and judge by the batter.
- The whitesFolding the beaten whites in last is what keeps the cakes from being heavy and pudding-like. Fold gently and cook straight away rather than letting the batter stand.
- Sieving mattersSkipping the colander leaves lumps of wet crust that stay dense through cooking. If the bread is very crusty, cut the crusts off before soaking or work the pulp through with the back of a ladle.
- YieldA quart of pulp plus flour makes a large batch of cakes; the recipe gives no number. Griddle cakes of this era were typically served with butter and syrup or molasses.
Bread cakes belong to the large family of nineteenth-century recipes whose real purpose is that nothing edible leaves the kitchen. Before commercial sliced bread, a household baked several large loaves at a time and the last of them went stale hard; soaking those ends overnight in the sour milk that a dairying household also had on hand solved two leftovers at once. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Marysville, Ohio, by Estelle Woods Wilcox from contributions of local women and generally dated to 1877, is thick with this kind of economy, and its griddle-cake chapter appears to run through buckwheat, rice, hominy, cornmeal and bread batters more or less interchangeably. The pairing of sour milk and saleratus or soda was the standard American chemical leavening of the period, predating reliable baking powder in many rural kitchens, and it is why so many recipes of the era call for milk that a modern cook would pour away.