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Pikelets
Whisk two eggs thoroughly, and mix with them a pinch of salt, a little grated nutmeg, a pint of lukewarm milk, two pounds of flour, and a table-spoonful of good fresh yeast. Beat the mixture for ten or twelve minutes, put it into a bowl, cover with a cloth, and let it remain near the fire for two hours, by which time it ought to have risen lightly. Make it into round cakes, half an inch thick and the size of a saucer. Bake these on a griddle, and when they are done enough on one side, turn them upon the other. Butter the pikelets whilst hot, and send three or four to table together. If any are left till the next day, they should be toasted and buttered like crumpets. Time to bake, three or four minutes. Probable cost, 1/2d. each. Sufficient, one or two for each person.
A yeast-raised griddle cake in the older, dough-based style rather than the loose batter poured into rings that most people now call a pikelet. The quantities are large and the dough is stiffer than you may expect.
- Scale it downTwo pounds of flour (about 900 g) with a pint of milk makes a very large batch; the recipe gives no yield, but at half an inch thick and saucer-width it is somewhere around a dozen to fifteen cakes. Quartering the recipe — 225 g flour, 140 ml milk, half an egg beaten and divided by weight — is more realistic for one household.
- The pint is imperialCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, about 570 ml, not the American 16. With two eggs this gives a hydration of roughly 70 per cent: a soft, sticky dough you can shape with floured hands, not a pourable batter.
- The yeastA tablespoon of "good fresh yeast" means compressed baker's yeast, about 15 g. Substitute 5 g (1½ tsp) instant dried yeast, or 7 g active dry bloomed in a little of the lukewarm milk first.
- Lukewarm, not hotMilk hot enough to feel hot on the wrist will damage the yeast; blood temperature is the target. The ten to twelve minutes of beating is doing gluten development — it matters more than it looks, since there is no second knead.
- "Near the fire"A warm spot at 75-80F. Two hours is right at that temperature; a cool modern kitchen may need three, and the dough should be visibly domed and slack before shaping.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 350-375F on a heavy pan or bakestone, lightly greased. The recipe allows three or four minutes in all, turned once; at that heat the centre cooks without a scorched crust, and too hot a griddle leaves the half-inch thickness raw inside.
- ShapingHalf an inch thick and saucer-width, four to five inches across. Handle the dough with floured hands and press rather than roll, so the gas from the rise is not driven out.
- Next dayThese stale quickly. The recipe's instruction to toast and butter any left over is the standard treatment.
"Pikelet" is generally traced to the Welsh bara pyglyd, "pitchy bread", which passed into English along the border as pyglyd and then pikelet; by the eighteenth century it was current across the West Midlands and the North, where in many places it remains the ordinary word for a crumpet. Cassell's, compiling a national dictionary in the 1870s, treats pikelets and crumpets as neighbouring but distinct things — the pikelet here is a shaped dough cake cooked on a griddle — and quietly acknowledges the overlap by telling the cook to serve leftovers "like crumpets". The halfpenny apiece is the sort of costing the book gives throughout.