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Plain Pancakes
2 cups sour milk 3 eggs (beaten separately) 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon salt Five Roses flour to thicken.
Mix as usual. Beat the whites of the 3 eggs and stir in slowly last thing before baking.
A skeleton recipe of the kind written for cooks who already knew what pancake batter should look like. Two things need translating: the sour milk, and the flour quantity that is never given.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and tangy. Cultured buttermilk is the direct substitute, cup for cup; failing that, 2 cups of whole milk with 2 tablespoons of lemon juice or white vinegar stirred in and left 10 minutes.
- "Flour to thicken"Genuinely unspecified. For 2 cups of liquid plus 3 eggs, expect somewhere between 1 3/4 and 2 1/4 cups of all-purpose flour, added until the batter ribbons thickly off the spoon rather than runs. Stop short rather than overshoot; thin batter makes tender pancakes.
- SodaA full teaspoon of baking soda is correct here because the acid in the sour milk neutralises it. If you substitute sweet milk the pancakes will taste soapy and turn yellow-grey, so use an acidic liquid or switch to baking powder.
- "Beaten separately"Yolks go into the batter with the milk; the whites are whipped and, as the recipe directs, stirred in slowly at the very end. Handle them gently and cook without long delay, since the soda has already begun working in the acidic batter.
- "Baking"In this period pancakes were said to be baked whether they went on a griddle or in a pan. Cook on a griddle or heavy skillet at about 375F, lightly greased, until the surface bubbles and the edges set, then turn once.
- YieldAbout sixteen to eighteen pancakes of 4 inches, serving four.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, which distributed it to buyers of its Five Roses flour -- hence the brand name in the ingredient list. Sour-milk baking of this sort was ordinary household economy in a period before reliable refrigeration: milk soured on its own within a day or two in a warm kitchen, and pairing it with saleratus or baking soda turned a liability into leavening. Recipes like this one, telling the cook to "mix as usual," assume a reader who has made pancakes since childhood and needs only the proportions.