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Buttermilk
2 cups Five Roses flour (see note) ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon soda (level). 1¾ cups sour milk or buttermilk 1 tablespoon melted butter 1 tablespoon sugar.
Bake on good hot griddle and turn over.
Note-If the buttermilk is thick, measure the flour scant; if it is thin, let the measure be generous.
A bare-bones buttermilk pancake formula from a mill's own cookbook, written for cooks who already knew what a batter should look like. The instructions assume you will judge consistency by eye, which is why the note about thick and thin buttermilk carries most of the weight.
- The hinge is batter consistency, not the measurementsThe note at the end is the actual recipe: churned buttermilk varied from nearly cream-thick to almost watery, so the flour was adjusted rather than the liquid. Aim for a batter that ribbons off the spoon and spreads slowly on the griddle; add flour a spoonful at a time if it runs thin.
- Five Roses flourA hard Canadian spring-wheat flour milled by Lake of the Woods Milling Company, stronger than most American all-purpose flour of the day. Modern unbleached all-purpose works; the cakes will be marginally more tender.
- Sour milk vs. buttermilk"Sour milk" here means raw milk left to clabber naturally, which is not what happens to pasteurised milk today. Use cultured buttermilk, or 1½ cups milk with 1½ tablespoons lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- Soda without baking powderOne level teaspoon of soda is the sole leavening and it needs the acid in the buttermilk to work. Mix the batter just before cooking and stop stirring as soon as the flour is wetted; the lift begins immediately and does not survive a long rest.
- No eggThere is no egg in the formula, as in many plain everyday griddle cakes. Expect a softer, more tender crumb than an egg batter gives, and a cake that wants careful handling with the turner.
- "Good hot griddle"The book gives no temperature. Modern pancake guidance usually lands around 375F on an electric griddle; otherwise a heavy pan over medium heat, where a drop of water skitters rather than sits. Turn once, when the surface bubbles have opened and the edges look dry.
- GreasingThere is a tablespoon of butter in the batter but nothing said about the pan. A cast-iron griddle needs the lightest wipe of fat; too much and the cakes fry unevenly and go blotchy.
- YieldRoughly a dozen four-inch cakes, enough for three or four people at breakfast.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed with sacks of its flour; the recipes were solicited from Canadian housewives, which is why they read like notes passed between people who already cook rather than instructions for beginners. Buttermilk in that period was the thin, sour liquid left in the churn after butter was made, a genuine farm by-product with no fixed thickness or acidity, and the closing note about scant and generous measures is a direct acknowledgement of that variability. Cultured buttermilk sold today is a manufactured product with consistent body, so the adjustment the recipe warns about is much less likely to be needed. Griddle cakes leavened with soda and sour milk were the everyday breakfast bread across rural North America long before baking powder became cheap and universal, and this recipe is essentially that older method preserved in a promotional cookbook.