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Indian Crumpets
Stir into a quart of warmed milk two large table-spoonfuls of yeast, a little salt, and as much wheat flour as will thicken the milk to a batter. Cover it up closely by the side of the fire until next morning, then add a gill of melted butter, and make into a soft dough with yellow cornmeal. Rub a griddle over with butter, and bake about fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 1s.
A yeast-raised cornmeal griddle cake built on an overnight sponge. The instructions are terse in the way Victorian dictionary entries usually are, so a few quantities have to be read rather than followed literally.
- The hinge: dough stiffnessThe sponge is thickened with cornmeal only until it is a soft dough — slack enough to spread on the griddle, firm enough to hold a shape. Add the meal a few spoonfuls at a time; too much and the cakes bake dry and gritty, since cornmeal keeps absorbing liquid as it stands.
- Archaic measuresA gill is a quarter of a pint; in an English book that means about 5 fl oz (roughly 140 ml) of melted butter, a generous but plausible amount for a quart of milk. "Two large table-spoonfuls of yeast" means liquid brewer's barm; a couple of teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast is the usual modern stand-in, though the substitution is approximate.
- Yellow cornmealFine or medium stone-ground yellow meal is what is meant. Modern degerminated supermarket meal works but tastes flatter; masa harina is nixtamalised and will taste wrong, and polenta-grade coarse grits will not soften in the time given.
- The overnight rise"By the side of the fire" means a warm spot, not a hot one. In a modern kitchen leave the covered sponge on the counter overnight; in a very warm room, refrigerate after a couple of hours or the batter will sour and collapse.
- Fifteen minutes on a griddleThat timing assumes thick cakes on a moderate griddle, cooked slowly and turned once. Thin them to the usual pancake depth and they will be done in a few minutes a side, so judge by colour rather than the clock.
- Not crumpets as we know themThere are no rings and no holey top. These are griddle cakes; if you want the open honeycomb, cook them in muffin rings and resist turning until the surface has set.
- YieldA quart of milk plus flour and meal makes a large batch — roughly 18 to 24 cakes of ordinary size. Halve everything unless you are feeding a household. They eat best hot, split and buttered.
- Probable costCassell's attached a probable cost to each dish; one shilling is the book's own estimate for this quantity, and is best read as a period price rather than as guidance for us.
"Indian" in nineteenth-century British and American cookbooks means maize: Indian meal was cornmeal, and Indian pudding, Indian bread and Indian cake all take their name from the grain rather than from India. Cassell's, compiled in London for a middle-class readership, gathered such recipes wherever it found them, and this one has the shape of an American griddle-cake formula — an overnight yeast sponge of milk and wheat flour, finished with cornmeal — filed under the more familiar English name of crumpet. Maize was imported into Britain in quantity during the nineteenth century, much of it as animal feed and cheap meal. The overnight sponge is the older technique here: before chemical raising agents were widespread, barm and flour could be set to work at night and the morning's bread or cakes built on it, which is also why the recipe assumes a kitchen with a fire still warm at bedtime.