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Fadge
1 cup Five Roses flour 1 cup cold water.
Bake Mix until light, pour into hot buttered gem pans and bake 35 minutes.
A two-ingredient batter bread of the plainest sort, baked in cast-iron gem pans. Everything depends on the pans being blazing hot before the batter touches them.
- Gem pansHeavy cast-iron muffin or popover pans. Set them in the oven while it preheats, then butter them and fill quickly; a cold pan gives a flat, tough result.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A water batter of this kind needs to set fast and puff, so a hot oven -- somewhere in the region of 425-450F -- is a reasonable modern guess, with the door left shut for the early part of the bake. Note the recipe's own timing is 35 minutes.
- "Mix until light"With no egg and no leavening, the only lift comes from beaten-in air and steam. Whisk hard for a full two or three minutes until the batter is smooth and frothy, then bake at once.
- What to expectFlour and cold water alone are likely to bake to something between a popover and a hard biscuit -- crisp shell, damp interior. The recipe gives no serving directions; breads of this type are best eaten hot from the pan.
- SaltNone is called for. Modern cooks will likely find the result bland; about a quarter teaspoon per cup of flour would season it.
- YieldOne cup of flour and one cup of water makes a small quantity of batter; expect roughly half a dozen standard gems, or fewer large popover cups. Best served straight from the oven, as such breads tend to sink as they cool.
"Fadge" is an Irish word, most often attached to the flat potato bread of Ulster, cooked on a griddle and cut in farls. It also carried the looser sense of any thick, plain cake of dough -- which is closer to what appears here, a flour-and-water batter baked in gem irons. Five Roses was the flour brand of the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, and its cook book drew on recipes contributed by Canadian housewives. How a name attached to an Ulster griddle bread of potatoes came to sit above a gem-pan bread of flour and water is not recorded.