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AMERICAN BREAKFAST (or GRIDDLE) CAKES
Whisk two eggs, stir them into a quart of lukewarm milk and add a tea-spoonful of baking powder, and a salt-spoonful of salt. Mix with them sufficient Indian meal to make a stiff batter, and bake them in small round tins which have been oiled or buttered. Bake in a good oven. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1d. each. This will make about two dozen cakes.
A plain cornmeal batter baked in rings rather than cooked on a griddle, despite the name. A few of Cassell's terms and proportions need translating before it will work.
- Indian meal is cornmealNineteenth-century British books use "Indian meal" for maize meal imported from America. Use a medium-grind yellow cornmeal, not polenta-coarse and not the fine, pre-mixed cornmeal that already contains leavening.
- Baked, not griddledThe title offers "griddle cakes" but the method is a batter baked in tins for twenty minutes, which produces something closer to a corn muffin. If you want griddle cakes, thin the batter with more milk and cook them on a greased plate for two to three minutes a side instead.
- A quart of milkAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, or about 5 US cups. If you scale to a US quart of 4 cups the batter will simply be a little stiffer, which suits the baked version.
- A salt-spoonfulA Victorian salt-spoon holds roughly a quarter teaspoon. Cornmeal takes salt well, so half a teaspoon across this quantity is not excessive.
- The leavening is thinOne teaspoon of baking powder for a quart of milk and enough meal to stiffen it is very little by modern standards, and commercial baking powders of the period were single-acting and variable in strength. Allow two to three teaspoons if you want any real rise, and get the tins into the oven promptly once it is mixed.
- "A good oven"The book gives no temperature. A fairly hot oven, in the region of 400F, suits small tins; test with a skewer rather than the clock.
- Small round tinsThese are muffin rings or a gem pan. A standard 12-cup muffin tin filled two-thirds works; grease it well, as cornmeal batters with little fat stick badly.
- YieldThe recipe claims about two dozen small cakes; a modern muffin tin will give fewer, larger ones. Best eaten hot from the oven with butter, as cornmeal cakes dry out quickly.
Cassell's presents this as an American dish, and the name is the giveaway: "Indian meal" was the standard British and colonial term for maize, so called because it was the grain of the Native Americans rather than of India. Cornmeal batters cooked on a hot iron plate or baked in rings were everyday food across the United States long before this book appeared. The costing at a penny a cake is typical of Cassell's, which gives a "probable cost" for nearly every dish so a household could judge it against the housekeeping book.