Home › The Principles of Cookery › Indian Griddle Cake
Indian Griddle Cake
To one quart of new milk add as much flour as will make a thick batter. Mix with the milk two eggs well beaten before the mixing, and with the flour a little salt. Rub butter over a hot griddle; drop the batter from a table-spoon on to it, and bake at once.
A plain drop batter with no raising agent, from a period when a hot griddle and a quick hand did the work that baking powder does now. Two things need attention before you start: the vague flour quantity and the missing leavening.
- How much flour"As much flour as will make a thick batter" is genuinely open. For a quart (4 cups) of whole milk, start with about 3 1/2 cups of plain flour and add more by the spoonful until the batter drops thickly from a tablespoon rather than pouring. Err on the loose side; too stiff and the centres stay raw.
- New milk"New" milk is fresh whole milk straight from the cow, unskimmed and unsoured. Whole milk is the right substitute. The distinction mattered because soured milk would have called for saleratus (baking soda) to work against it.
- No leaveningThere is none, and none is implied. Expect flat, close, slightly custardy cakes closer to a thick pancake than a fluffy American one. If you want lift you are making a different recipe; whisk the eggs to a good foam and use the batter promptly to get what rise is available.
- Griddle heatMedium. The recipe says only 'hot griddle', but around 350-375F on a griddle thermometer or an electric griddle suits. A drop of batter should set within a few seconds without browning instantly. Too hot and the outside colours long before the interior sets.
- Butter on the griddleButter rubbed on a hot griddle browns and then burns within a batch or two. Wipe the surface and re-butter between rounds, or use clarified butter, which holds up considerably longer at griddle heat.
- Bake at onceBeaten egg is the batter's only aeration, and what lift it gives is largely lost on standing, so cook the batter promptly rather than let a bowl of it sit while you work through the first round.
- YieldA full quart of milk gives a great deal of batter, several dozen small tablespoon-sized cakes. Halving the recipe is sensible for four people.
In nineteenth-century cookery "Indian" almost always meant maize: Indian meal is cornmeal, and Indian bread, Indian pudding and Indian cakes were all built on it, the word carrying over from the early colonial name for American corn. The oddity here is that the recipe calls only for flour, which may suggest a title inherited from an older cornmeal formula and then quietly anglicised for a British kitchen where wheat flour was to hand, though this is conjecture. What survives is the sort of stripped-down result: no leavening, no sugar, no spice, just milk, eggs, flour and a buttered iron surface over the fire. Griddle baking of this kind long predated reliable ovens in ordinary homes, and it survived in cookbooks well after ovens became common because it was fast, needed no waiting for dough to rise, and used the batter up the moment it was mixed.