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B. F. Pancakes
1 quart sour milk 2 teaspoons soda 1 teaspoon salt 2 eggs.
Mix with equal parts Five Roses flour and breakfast food to make smooth pancake batter. Beat well. Bake as usual. Serve hot with butter and syrup. See other pancake recipes page 49.
A leftover-porridge pancake from the Lake of the Woods Milling Company's Five Roses book, written for cooks who kept a pot of cooked cereal on the back of the stove. The proportions assume you will judge the batter by eye rather than by cup.
- What "breakfast food" meansIn this period the term covers prepared cereals generally — rolled oats, cracked wheat, cornmeal mush or a packaged flaked grain — and in a batter recipe like this it most likely means cooked cereal, quite possibly the previous morning's leftovers. Cold cooked porridge is stiff, so slacken it with a little of the sour milk before adding flour, or you will get lumps that no amount of beating will break up.
- "Equal parts" is genuinely vagueThe original gives no quantity at all for the flour and cereal, only that they be equal and that the batter be smooth. Any figure is a modern guess: starting with about 2 cups flour and 2 cups cooked cereal to a quart of sour milk will give a very loose batter, and you should expect to add a good deal more of each, in equal measure, until the batter ribbons thickly off the spoon.
- Sour milk and the sodaSour milk here means milk clabbered at room temperature, which ordinary pasteurised milk will not do — left out it spoils rather than sours. Use cultured buttermilk, quart for quart. The 2 teaspoons of soda are matched to that acid; leave them at that and do not add baking powder as well.
- Beat well, then stopThe instruction predates the modern warning about gluten, but it applies to the eggs and soda, not to endless mixing. Beat until the batter is smooth, then cook promptly — the soda begins working against the buttermilk immediately and the lift falls off as the batter stands.
- "Bake as usual"Baking a pancake means cooking it on a griddle, not in an oven. A griddle at 375F, lightly greased, gives about two minutes on the first side, until the bubbles set and the edges dull, and a minute on the second.
- Cereal pancakes cook slowerThe grain in the batter holds moisture and browns faster than it cooks through, so keep the heat a shade lower than for a plain flour pancake and make them small — three inches or so. A thick, wide one will colour handsomely and still be wet in the middle.
- YieldA full quart of milk is a large batch by present standards: expect roughly 30 to 36 small pancakes, enough for eight people. Halve everything for a household of four.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and generally sold cheaply to Canadian households that bought its flour; recipes were solicited from customers, which is why so many are terse, unmeasured and clearly written by someone who already knew the dish. "B. F." stands for breakfast food, the period's catch-all for cooked breakfast cereal, and the recipe belongs to a long tradition of thrift cookery in which yesterday's porridge is folded into today's batter rather than thrown out — the same instinct that produced bread pudding and hash. Packaged flaked and rolled cereals displaced the home-cooked porridge pot in North American kitchens only gradually, in a shift running from the 1890s into the 1920s, and a recipe like this one sits on the hinge between the two, equally happy with a bowl of leftover oatmeal or a scoop from a cardboard box.