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Plain Griddle Cakes
½ pint milk 2 eggs ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon butter 2 teaspoons baking powder Five Roses flour to make batter.
A list of ingredients rather than a method, in the shorthand style used throughout this book: the cook was expected to know what a griddle cake batter should look like. A few numbers fill in the gaps.
- Half a pint of milkA cup in US measure, though in the Canadian imperial measure this book would have used, half a pint is 10 fluid ounces, nearer 1¼ cups. Everything else scales from it.
- "Flour to make batter"The only genuinely open quantity here. For cakes that spread and set with a thin edge, expect roughly 1¼ to 1½ cups of all-purpose flour with one cup of milk and two eggs. Add it gradually and stop when the batter ribbons thickly off the spoon rather than pouring in a stream.
- The flour itselfFive Roses was a hard Canadian spring wheat flour, higher in protein than most modern all-purpose. Ordinary all-purpose works; bread flour will make the cakes chewier than intended.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to about a cup and a half of flour is a generous but unremarkable amount, and appropriate for a batter with no acid in it. Use fresh powder and cook the cakes soon after mixing.
- The butterOne teaspoon is for tenderness and flavour, not for greasing. Melt it and beat it in with the milk and eggs; grease the griddle separately.
- Griddle heatMedium, about 375F on an electric griddle. A drop of water should skitter rather than sit or vanish instantly. Turn once, when the surface bubbles have opened and the edges look dry.
- YieldAbout ten to twelve cakes of four inches, enough for three people at breakfast.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and handed out to promote its Five Roses brand of hard spring wheat flour, one of the great success stories of the Canadian prairie milling trade. Books of this kind assume the reader already cooks; a recipe like this one is really a proportion to be memorized rather than a set of instructions, which is why it ends with the phrase "flour to make batter" and leaves the rest to judgment. The plain baking-powder griddle cake, with no buttermilk and no sour milk, sits alongside the older practice of souring milk overnight and correcting it with saleratus in the morning, a method that went on appearing in print well after chemical leavening became cheap and reliable.
Bread Crumbs
Cover bread crumbs with sour milk, and let soak until a pulpy mass. 1 cup soaked bread crumbs 1 cup Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon soda Cold water to make thin batter. Sift the flour, salt and soda into the bread crumbs. Add water gradually and beat well. Pour by spoonfuls on a slightly greased pan. When lightly browned on one side, turn and cook on the other. Serve in hot dish.