Home › The Principles of Cookery › Yorkshire Girdle Cakes
Yorkshire Girdle Cakes
Take a pound and a half of flour and two ounces of butter, rub well together with a little salt and enough milk to make a stiff dough. Add a tea-spoonful of baking-powder; knead it well, and roll out half an inch thick. Put it on the girdle, which must be quite hot. Move it about constantly to see when the under side is done; then turn it and bake the other side. When done, cut it into three-corncered pieces; split open, and butter them.
A hearth cake, cooked on a flat iron plate rather than in an oven. The recipe assumes a girdle hanging over a fire, where heat is controlled by raising the plate rather than turning a dial.
- The hinge: moderate heat, not "quite hot"Half an inch of stiff dough takes several minutes a side to cook through. On a fiercely hot plate the outside can blacken while the centre stays raw, so heat the pan well, then settle it to medium-low before the dough goes on.
- Girdle means griddleA girdle (also bakestone or backstone in the north) is a flat, thick iron plate. A heavy cast-iron frying pan or a flat cast-iron griddle is the direct equivalent. Use it dry and ungreased; wipe it with salt rather than washing it if it sticks.
- QuantitiesA pound and a half of flour is about 5 1/2 cups; two ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons. The milk is unmeasured because flour varies: add only enough to bring it to a dough stiff enough to roll.
- Add the baking powder with the flourThe original adds it after the milk, which makes even distribution hard. Sift it into the flour before rubbing in the butter. A teaspoon to 1 1/2 lb flour is a light lift by modern standards; two teaspoons gives a better rise.
- Knead lightly"Knead it well" here means bringing the dough together smoothly, not developing gluten as for bread. Overworking makes the cakes tough and leathery.
- Judging donenessThe constant moving is to check colour and prevent hot spots, not to keep it in motion. The cake is done when both sides are freckled brown and it sounds hollow tapped underneath.
- Yield and servingThis makes two large cakes or three smaller ones, cut into wedges, split hot and buttered so the butter soaks in. Eight to twelve portions. They are meant for the same day; reheat any leftovers briefly on the dry pan.
"Girdle" is the northern and Scots form of griddle, and the flat iron plate it names was for centuries a main baking surface in households without a built oven: dough went onto the hot metal over the fire, not into a chamber. Yorkshire, Northumberland and lowland Scotland all kept a family of such cakes and cognate breads, from bakestone cakes to singin' hinnies and Scottish girdle scones, cooked in minutes and eaten at once. Commercial baking powders became widely available in Britain from the middle of the nineteenth century, so the teaspoon of baking powder here suggests a Victorian rather than a truly old form of the recipe, of a kind that would otherwise have relied on sour milk and soda, or on no leavening at all.