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Corn Pancakes
1 cup cornmeal ¾ cup Five Roses flour ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon (heaping) soda 2 teaspoons (heaping) cream of tartar Water to mix quite thin.
A bare-bones griddle batter with no egg, milk or fat — leavening comes entirely from soda plus cream of tartar, which means the batter has to be cooked the moment it is mixed.
- Mix and cook immediatelyCream of tartar reacts with soda on contact with water and is spent within a few minutes. Have the griddle hot before the water goes in, and do not let the bowl stand.
- The leavening, in modern termsOne part soda to two parts cream of tartar by volume is single-acting baking powder. Level teaspoons are safer than the "heaping" called for here; heaped measures in this quantity of flour give a soapy, metallic edge.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat white flour from the Lake of the Woods Milling Company. All-purpose flour is the direct substitute.
- "Water to mix quite thin"Expect roughly 1½ to 2 cups, poured in gradually until the batter runs off the spoon in a ribbon. Cornmeal keeps absorbing liquid, so judge by feel rather than a fixed figure.
- Soften the cornmealFine or medium cornmeal works; coarse meal stays gritty in a batter cooked this fast. Stirring the meal with a little boiling water first and letting it cool before adding the flour and leavening improves the texture, though the original does not ask for it.
- Griddle heat and fatA hot griddle — a drop of water should skitter and vanish. There is no fat in the batter, so the griddle must be greased between batches or the cakes will stick and tear.
- YieldRoughly a dozen or more cakes of three to four inches, depending on how thin the batter is run; serving three or four. Because there is no egg or milk, they are lean and best eaten straight from the pan with butter and syrup or molasses.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to promote its Five Roses brand flour, which is why the flour is named by trademark in the ingredient list while everything else is generic. Cornmeal pancakes of this kind belong to a long North American line of griddle cakes stretched with cheaper meal, and the recipe's total absence of egg, milk and butter suggests an economy formula. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing was still common in Canadian household books of the period, a holdover from the decades before commercial baking powder became universal.