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PIKELETS (another way)
Rub an ounce of fresh butter into a pound of flour. Add a pinch of salt, and a well-beaten egg. Put the flour into a bowl, and make a hole in the middle of it. Pour into this a quarter of an ounce of German yeast dissolved in two table-spoonfuls of tepid water. Stir all together, and add as much lukewarm milk as will make the whole like thick batter. Beat for ten or twelve minutes, and let it stand near the fire for an hour. Put the bakestone over a moderate fire. Melt a little butter or lard upon this, and pour over it a tea-cupful of the batter. When one side is done, turn it lightly upon the other. Butter the pikelets whilst hot, and serve them three or four on a plate. The bakestone will require to be freshly greased with each pikelet. Time to bake, about two minutes each side. Sufficient, one or two for each person. Probable cost, 1/2d. each.
A yeast-raised griddle batter, closer to a thin crumpet than to a pancake. The whole thing hangs on getting the batter to a thick, pourable state and giving it a full hour to work.
- German yeastThis is fresh compressed baker's yeast. A quarter of an ounce is about 7 g fresh, equivalent to roughly 2 g (¾ teaspoon) instant dried yeast, which can be stirred straight into the flour instead of slaked in water.
- Weights in metricA pound of flour is about 450 g, roughly 3½ cups; an ounce of butter is 28 g. The milk is not measured in the original — expect somewhere near 400–500 ml to reach the "thick batter" consistency, still loose enough to pour from a cup.
- The bakestoneA flat stone or iron plate set over the fire. A cast-iron griddle, a heavy frying pan or an electric griddle at a steady medium heat does the same work. "A moderate fire" here means hot enough to set the batter in a minute, not hot enough to scorch the butter.
- Beating mattersTen or twelve minutes of beating by hand develops the gluten so the batter traps gas and holes form on the surface. A few minutes in a stand mixer on medium will do much the same work.
- The hour by the fireDo not shorten it. The batter should be visibly bubbled and smell faintly of beer before it goes on the griddle; that fermentation is the only leavening and the source of the flavour.
- RegreasingThe instruction to grease afresh for each pikelet is not fussiness — the batter is slack and will stick to a dry spot. Wipe the pan with buttered paper between each one.
- Timing and turningTwo minutes a side matches the original's own timing for a teacupful of batter poured free. Turn only once, when the top has gone matte and pitted.
- YieldA pound of flour makes a large bowl of batter; at a teacupful each, expect perhaps six to eight pikelets, enough for several people at the one or two each the recipe allows. They are meant to be eaten hot off the stone, buttered as they come.
Pikelets belong to the crumpet family, and the name is generally traced to the Welsh bara pyglyd — "pitchy" or dark bread — which travelled into the English Midlands and the North as pyklet and then pikelet. Where a crumpet is baked in a ring to make a deep, hole-riddled disc, a pikelet is the same yeasted batter poured free onto the bakestone, so it spreads thinner and crisps at the edge. The book gives the cost as a halfpenny each, which places it among the cheap teatime breads of the Victorian household: flour, a scrap of butter, an egg and a little yeast, cooked on the stone rather than in the oven. In Australia and New Zealand the word later drifted to mean a small thick pancake, but in this book it still means the griddled yeast batter.