Home › Griddle-Cakes › Flannel Cakes
Flannel Cakes
Make hot a pint of sweet milk, and into it put two heaping tablespoons butter, let melt, then add a pint of cold milk, the wellbeaten yolks of four eggs-placing the whites in a cold place-a tea-spoon of salt, four table-spoons potato yeast, and sufficient flour to make a stiff batter; set in a warm place to rise, let stand three hours or over night; before baking add the beaten whites; fry like any other griddle-cakes. Be sure to make batter just stiff enough, for flour must not be added in the morning unless it is allowed to rise again.
A yeast-raised griddle cake, mixed the night before and lightened with beaten whites in the morning. The whole point is the long, slow rise, so plan backward from breakfast.
- The hinge: do not thicken in the morningThe batter must be right when you set it to rise. Adding flour to a risen batter deflates it and leaves raw-tasting flour with nothing to soften it, which is why the original insists on a second rise if you do. Judge the consistency the night before: a thick, spoonable batter that mounds slightly, not a pourable one.
- Potato yeastA homemade starter used in period kitchens, made from boiled potato, flour and sugar. Four tablespoons of it corresponds very roughly to about a teaspoon of active dry yeast; a half cup of active sourdough starter can stand in, with the overnight rise doing the same job.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, distinguished in these books from buttermilk and "loppered" milk. Whole milk is closest to what was meant.
- Quantities and flourTwo pints of milk is 4 cups, so this is a large batch. Expect roughly 4 to 5 cups of flour or more to reach a stiff batter; the original gives no figure, and flour absorbency varied, so go by feel.
- Why heat half the milkThe hot pint melts the butter and, once the cold pint is added, brings the mixture to blood heat, which is what the yeast wants. Add the yolks only after the mixture has cooled to lukewarm or they will curdle.
- Overnight riseThe original sets the batter in a warm place, for three hours or overnight. If you refrigerate it overnight, let the bowl stand out to lose its chill before folding in the whites.
- The whitesBeat them to soft peaks and fold in with a light hand just before baking; the batter should look streaky rather than smooth. Cook promptly, as the foam does not hold long.
- Griddle and yieldA lightly greased griddle over moderate heat; the original specifies no temperature. This makes roughly 24 to 30 cakes of four inches, enough for six to eight people.
"Flannel cake" was a common nineteenth-century American name for a griddle cake raised with yeast and beaten egg whites rather than with soda and sour milk, the texture being said, by traditional explanation, to resemble soft napped cloth. Its presence in Buckeye Cookery (published in Minneapolis in 1877, after an earlier Ohio printing, as a fundraiser by the ladies of a Marysville, Ohio, church, and reprinted for decades) sits alongside a long run of griddle-cake recipes using yeast, saleratus, and baking powder side by side, which is a fair picture of the 1870s transition between raising agents. The instruction to use potato yeast rather than a purchased cake is the telling detail: commercial compressed yeast was available in cities by then but was not yet a given in a household kitchen, so the batter was set at night to catch a wild-and-cultivated starter at its peak by morning. The insistence on getting the consistency right before the rise reflects a kitchen where a failed breakfast batter could not simply be started over at short notice.