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Rye Batter Cakes
Mix as much lukewarm milk with a pint of rye-meal as will make a thin batter. Beat this well, add a little salt and a quarter of a pint of home-made yeast. Let the dough rise, then bake the cakes on a griddle. Or take from the risen dough made for rye bread as much as will make a small loaf. Work into this a quarter of a pound of good dripping or butter, make the dough into a flat cake an inch thick, and bake in a quick oven. Time to bake, twenty minutes or more.
Two methods sit in one entry: a poured yeast batter cooked on a griddle, and an enriched piece of rye bread dough baked as a flat cake. Read them as alternatives, not as steps.
- Rye-mealThis is rye flour, coarser than the white rye sold today; a medium or dark rye, or a stone-ground wholemeal rye, is the nearest match. Rye has little gluten, so the batter will never become elastic and the baked cake will stay dense and close-grained.
- The pintThe meal here is measured by volume; an imperial pint is 20 fl oz, roughly 2.4 US cups, which comes to something like 8-10 oz of rye flour depending on how coarse it is. The milk is added by eye to a thin batter, so start with about the same volume of milk and adjust.
- Home-made yeastA quarter of a pint of Victorian barm or potato yeast was a live liquid starter, generally slower and less predictable than modern yeast. Roughly 1 teaspoon of instant dried yeast is a reasonable modern stand-in; if you use a rye sourdough starter instead, count its liquid against the milk.
- Lukewarm, not hotThe milk should be blood-warm, around 98-100F. Rye batters tend to ferment faster than wheat ones and go sour and slack, so a single rise of roughly 45 minutes to an hour, until bubbly, is usually enough. An overproofed rye batter spreads on the griddle and tastes sour.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 375F on a flat top, lightly greased. Rye tends to brown faster than wheat, so a gentler heat and a slightly longer cook than a wheat pancake, about three to four minutes a side, works best.
- A quick ovenFor the second method, about 400-425F. Twenty minutes or more suits a cake an inch thick; check for an internal temperature near 200F, as rye stays moist in the middle and can read as underdone by touch alone.
- DrippingBeef dripping was the ordinary household fat and gives a savoury, faintly meaty edge. Butter is the direct substitute; a quarter of a pound is 4 oz, which is a generous enrichment for a small loaf's worth of dough.
- YieldThe batter version will make something like a dozen griddle cakes of moderate size; the recipe does not say. The baked version gives one flat cake to cut in wedges. Both are best eaten warm, as rye firms up considerably on cooling.
Rye was the bread grain of northern Europe and of poorer English districts before cheap imported wheat took over in the nineteenth century, and by the time Cassell's dictionary appeared it had largely retreated in Britain to being a curiosity or a health food. The entry's second method, taking a lump from a batch of bread dough and enriching it with fat to bake as a flat cake, is one of the oldest domestic economies there is: the same logic produced lardy cake, fatty cutties and a good deal of Scots girdle baking. The reliance on "home-made yeast" places the recipe before compressed baker's yeast became universally available in home kitchens, when a cook kept a barm going from brewing or from a potato and hop ferment, and measured it by the gill rather than the gram.