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Indian Pancakes
One pint Indian meal, one tea-spoon salt, small tea-spoon soda ; pour on boiling water until a little thinner than mush; let stand until cool, add the yolks of four eggs, half a cup of flour in which is mixed two tea-spoons cream tartar; stir in as much sweet milk or water as will make the batter suitable to bake; beat the whites well, and add just before baking. - Mrs. W. W. Woods.
A scalded-cornmeal griddle cake leavened with the two halves of homemade baking powder. The scald is what makes it work: the meal has to soften and cool before the eggs go in.
- Indian mealNineteenth-century American for cornmeal, almost always yellow or white stone-ground and coarser than most supermarket meal today. A medium grind gives the closest texture; fine degerminated meal drinks less water, so add the boiling water gradually.
- A pint of mealMeasured by volume, not weight — about 2 cups, roughly 10 oz. The finished batter is corrected by eye later, so precision here matters less than the consistency you end up with.
- "A little thinner than mush"Mush is cooked cornmeal porridge, thick enough to hold a spoon upright. Aim for a loose, pourable-when-warm paste; it will stiffen considerably as it cools, which is expected.
- Soda and cream of tartarTogether these are baking powder — roughly 2 parts cream of tartar to 1 part soda, which is what the proportions here amount to. The mixture is single-acting, so it starts working the moment the wet batter is assembled; bake promptly rather than letting it sit.
- Let it cool before the eggsThe hinge of the recipe. Adding yolks to hot scalded meal scrambles them, and hot batter kills the lift from the soda before it reaches the griddle. Cool to lukewarm or below.
- Sweet milkFresh, unsoured milk — the distinction mattered when soured milk was a routine kitchen ingredient and would have reacted with the soda on its own. Any whole milk works.
- "Bake"On a greased griddle or heavy skillet over medium heat, not in the oven. Cornmeal batters brown faster than wheat ones and burn readily; keep the pan a little cooler than you would for wheat pancakes and give them longer per side.
- The whitesBeaten to soft peaks and folded in at the last moment, they are doing as much lifting as the leavening. Fold, do not stir, and cook the batter within a few minutes.
- YieldAbout 18 to 20 pancakes of ordinary size, enough for four to six at breakfast.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (Minneapolis, 1877 and many later printings) was a compiled community book, and this recipe carries its contributor's name as most of them do — a form of authority in a book with no single author. "Indian meal" was standard American usage for maize meal from the colonial period onward, distinguishing it from "meal" or "flour" meaning wheat, and it survives in Indian pudding. The scalding technique, pouring boiling water over the meal and letting it swell, is older than chemical leavening and appears throughout the corn-bread tradition; it gelatinizes the starch so the coarse meal does not stay gritty. The paired soda and cream of tartar show a household mixing its own baking powder, at a time when commercial brands had been on the market since the late 1850s and 1860s.