Home › Griddle Cakes › Flannel Cakes
Flannel Cakes
1 1/2 pints flour, 1 tablespoonful brown sugar, 1 teaspoonful salt, 2 heaping teaspoonfuls baking-powder, 2 eggs, 1 1/2 pints milk. Sift together flour, sugar, salt, and powder; add beaten eggs and milk; mix into smooth batter that will run in rather continuous stream from pitcher. Bake on good hot griddle rich brown color, in cakes large as tea saucers. Serve with maple syrup.
A thin, quick-raised breakfast batter measured by the pint, as was common in books written for cooks who owned a measuring pitcher rather than a set of cups.
- Pints to cups1 1/2 pints is 3 cups. So the recipe is 3 cups flour (about 13 oz) to 3 cups milk, plus 2 eggs — a batter roughly the consistency of heavy cream.
- The hinge is the pourEverything depends on the batter running "in rather continuous stream from pitcher." Flour absorbency varies; if it drops in blobs, thin it with milk a tablespoon at a time until it ribbons off the lip. Thick batter here gives a heavy cake, which defeats the point of the name.
- Griddle heatA "good hot griddle" is the only guide given; for a thin batter this is usually taken as somewhere around 375F, or a heavy pan over medium-high where a drop of water skitters rather than sits. Too cool and the cake spreads and toughens before it sets.
- Baking powderTwo heaping teaspoons reads as about 3 level teaspoons, i.e. roughly 1 tablespoon, for 3 cups of flour. Mix and cook without a long rest, as the lift begins as soon as the milk goes in.
- Size"Large as tea saucers" means about 5 inches across — noticeably wider and thinner than a modern diner pancake. Use a scant 1/4 cup of batter and let it spread on its own rather than pushing it.
- YieldAround two dozen cakes at that size, enough for four to six people at breakfast.
- GreasingCast iron or a well-seasoned griddle wants only a wipe of butter or bacon fat between batches. A pool of fat will fry the edges of a thin batter into lace before the centre sets.
The name is traditionally explained by the texture: a cake meant to be as soft and light as flannel cloth, in contrast to the sturdier buckwheat and cornmeal cakes that filled out American breakfast tables through the nineteenth century. Many earlier flannel cake recipes were raised overnight with yeast, and the whites of the eggs beaten separately and folded in; the version here shows what chemical baking powder did to household cooking as it became cheaper and more reliable in the later 1800s, collapsing a supper-to-breakfast process into a batter stirred up in five minutes. Here maple syrup is the only dressing called for.