Home › Fragments › SWEETIE'S FAVORITES
SWEETIE'S FAVORITES
Three eggs, one tea-spoon sugar, one coffee-cup sweet milk, one of warm water, four table-spoons potato yeast, flour enough to make stiff batter; beat yolks and sugar well, stir in milk, water, and yeast, and lastly flour, stir well, and set in warm place to rise; when light, beat whites to a stiff froth, and stir into batter with a pinch of salt; bake like batter cakes. These are splendid for breakfast if set the night before.
A yeast-raised pancake batter, set overnight and finished with whipped whites in the morning. Two things need translating: the potato yeast, which no one keeps any more, and the vague "coffee-cup."
- Potato yeastA home-cultured liquid starter made from boiled potato, flour, sugar and a little older yeast; four tablespoons of it carried both leaven and moisture. Substitute about 1 teaspoon instant or active dry yeast, and expect the batter to be slightly stiffer than the original since you lose roughly a quarter-cup of liquid.
- Coffee-cupNineteenth-century coffee-cups are generally reckoned at roughly a cup, sometimes a shade more; a tea-cup is usually taken as smaller, about three-quarters. Read both the milk and the water as about one cup each and adjust flour to suit.
- "Stiff batter" is not doughIt should hold a ribbon off the spoon and pour thickly, not pile up. Around 2 to 2 1/2 cups of flour gets you there; the overnight fermentation will slacken it noticeably by morning.
- Set it cool, not warmThe instruction to rise in a warm place assumes a few hours. If you set the batter the night before, leave it at ordinary room temperature or the refrigerator, or twelve hours of warmth will push it well past pleasantly sour into sharp.
- The hinge: whites go in last, at the griddleBeat and fold the whites only when you are ready to cook, and fold rather than stir despite the wording. Stirring them into a fermented batter knocks out the air that gives these cakes their lightness, and it cannot be recovered.
- Griddle heatMedium, about 375F, lightly greased. These can catch quickly, so the first cake is the test cake.
- Yield and servingAbout sixteen cakes of four inches, enough for four. With only a teaspoon of sugar in the batter these are not sweet on their own, and take well to butter and syrup or molasses.
Buckeye Cookery (Minneapolis, 1877, and reprinted many times) grew out of Ohio church and household contributions. Raised batter cakes like these were the older form of the American pancake: before commercial compressed yeast became widely available, and before baking powder became a pantry staple, a cook kept a liquid yeast going at home, and potato yeast was one such version, boiled potato giving the culture starch to feed on. Setting the batter overnight was a practical necessity rather than a flourish, and it produced a faintly tangy cake much closer to a modern sourdough pancake than to the quick-leavened kind that replaced it.