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Wheat Pancakes
1 quart sour milk 2 teaspoons soda 1 teaspoon salt 2 eggs.
Mix with equal parts of Five Roses flour and wheatmeal to make batter.
A skeleton recipe of the kind mills printed for cooks who already knew what pancake batter should look like: the flour is unmeasured and the method is assumed. Two things need pinning down — what the liquid is and how much flour it will take.
- Sour milk means clabbered, not spoiledThe original assumes raw milk left to sour, which is acidic and thickened. Use buttermilk, or a quart of milk with 4 tablespoons of lemon juice or white vinegar stirred in and left 10 minutes. Ordinary refrigerated milk that has gone off is not a substitute and should be discarded.
- The acid is the leaveningTwo teaspoons of soda against a quart of soured milk is the whole rising system — there is no baking powder here. If your buttermilk is mild, the cakes will be flat and faintly soapy; taste the batter and cut the soda to a scant 1 1/2 teaspoons if it reads bitter.
- WheatmealWheatmeal is whole wheat flour, generally coarser than white; the line between it and graham flour was never firmly fixed in period usage. Equal parts of it and white flour gives a nutty, slightly heavy cake; whole wheat pastry flour lightens it if you want that.
- How much flour "to make batter"For a quart of milk expect roughly 4 to 4 1/2 cups total flour, half of each kind. Aim for a batter that ribbons thickly off the spoon and spreads slowly on the griddle — thinner than muffin batter, thicker than cream.
- Cook it at onceSoda and acid react immediately. Mix the dry into the wet with a few strokes, leave the lumps, and start cooking within a minute or two; batter that sits for half an hour has spent its lift.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 375F on an electric griddle — a drop of water should skitter, not vanish instantly. Whole wheat browns faster than white flour, so a hair cooler than you would use for plain pancakes.
- YieldA quart of milk makes a great deal of batter: about 24 to 30 four-inch cakes, enough for eight people. Halve it for a household of two to four.
The Five Roses Cook Book was a promotional volume issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, and it was compiled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who used the brand. That accounts for the telegraphic style here — a contributor writing down what she already did every week, with no need to specify flour by the cup. The sour-milk-and-soda pairing that leavens these cakes was the standard household chemistry of the era: farm milk soured reliably on its own, and soda was cheap and kept indefinitely, so the combination outlasted the arrival of commercial baking powder by decades. The inclusion of wheatmeal alongside white flour reflects a mill selling both, and a period enthusiasm for whole-grain "brown" breads and cakes as wholesome fare.