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Rye Drop Cakes
Mix together a quart of milk, two eggs well beaten, a piece of butter as large as an egg, one tea-spoonful of soda, two tea-spoonfuls of cream of tartar, half a cupful of white sugar, and enough rye-meal to make a thick batter. Bake for half an hour.
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A plain soda-raised rye batter, dropped into hot pans and baked. The original gives neither oven temperature nor yield, and the flour quantity is left to judgement, so the batter consistency is the thing to get right.
- The hinge: batter thickness"Thick batter" here means it drops heavily from a spoon and holds a soft mound rather than pouring in a sheet. Rye meal absorbs liquid slowly, so mix, wait two or three minutes, then judge; adding flour to a batter that was only briefly slack gives dense, gummy cakes.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Melting it and adding it with the milk is the easiest way to work it into a thin drop batter, though the original does not say how it was incorporated.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon of soda to two of cream of tartar is the usual nineteenth-century pairing, and is roughly equivalent to 3 or 4 teaspoons of modern baking powder depending on the conversion used, though the period mixture acts only once rather than twice. Both were sold as loose powders and were often lumpy; sift them into the dry meal so they disperse. Once the acid meets the milk the reaction starts, so get the batter into the pans promptly.
- Rye-mealCoarsely ground whole rye, closer to today's dark or pumpernickel rye flour than to the light sifted rye sold for bread. Rye has almost no gluten strength, so these cakes rise from the chemical leavening alone and will be tender and slightly damp-crumbed by design.
- OvenThe original names no oven heat at all, only 'bake for half an hour'. A moderate oven, around 375F, suits that half hour in deep gem or muffin pans, greased; in shallow pans, or a hotter oven, they will be done sooner, so begin testing at about 20 minutes.
- QuantityA quart of milk plus the eggs and enough meal to thicken it makes a very large batch, on the order of two to three dozen cakes. Halving the whole recipe is sensible for a modern household, and the leavening halves cleanly.
- ServingBest hot from the oven with butter, though the original says nothing about how they were served. What is left over is better split and toasted than eaten cold.
Rye was the workaday grain of the northeastern United States and of much of northern Europe long before wheat flour became cheap and universally available, and it survived in home baking as "rye and Indian" bread, rye biscuits and cakes like these well after white flour had taken over the bread trough. "Drop cakes" simply means a batter too soft to handle, dropped by the spoonful into pans rather than rolled or cut, and the cast-iron gem pan of the period was made precisely for the job. The chemical leavening is the other period marker: soda with cream of tartar, measured separately by the spoon, was the ordinary substitute for yeast in quick baking through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, before packaged baking powder gradually displaced the pair, which went on being called for for decades. Cassell's, compiled in London in the 1870s from a wide range of contributed and reprinted material, carries such items with an initial in place of a name, and the rye-meal and cupful measures here may point to an American source.