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Crumb Pan Cakes
1 1/2 cups coarse bread crumbs 2 cups milk 1 tablespoon butter 2 eggs 1 cup Gold Medal flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 3/4 teaspoon salt Cook the crumbs, milk and butter in double boiler for fifteen minutes, rub through a sieve. When cool add the beaten yolks of 2 eggs and the flour sifted with baking powder and salt. Then fold in the whites beaten very stiff and bake slowly as ordinary griddle cakes.
A stale-bread pancake from the era when no crumb was thrown away. The batter is soft and custardy, and it behaves differently from a flour-only griddle cake.
- The hinge: cook them slowlyThe instruction to "bake slowly" is the whole recipe. A medium-low griddle gives the interior time to set before the bread crumbs scorch. On a hot griddle these are apt to blacken outside and stay wet in the middle.
- Coarse bread crumbsThis means dried or stale bread torn or grated to crumb, not the fine dry packaged crumbs sold for breading, and certainly not seasoned ones. Plain white bread a day or two old, crumbled by hand, is what the book assumes.
- Sieving the panadaRubbing the cooked crumb mixture through a sieve smooths out lumps of soaked bread. A food mill or a few pulses with an immersion blender does the same job; the aim is a thick, even paste rather than a puree.
- Cool before the yolks"When cool" is not fussiness. The mixture comes out of the double boiler hot enough to scramble egg yolks, so let it drop to warm room temperature first.
- Fold, then cook promptlyThe stiff whites and the baking powder both start working immediately. Batter left standing deflates and the cakes turn heavy.
- Batter consistencyDifferent breads absorb different amounts of milk. If the batter is stiff enough to mound rather than spread, thin it with a little milk before folding in the whites.
- YieldRoughly a dozen to sixteen cakes of three inches, depending on how large they are dropped; enough for about four people. Serve with syrup or stewed fruit.
Gold Medal Flour's cookbooks were promotional literature from the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis, the firm that later became General Mills, and they were distributed in enormous numbers in the early twentieth century to put the brand name inside American kitchens. Recipes like this one sat easily in that world: a household that baked its own bread produced stale ends and crusts constantly, and cookbooks of the period are full of ways to move them back onto the table as puddings, brown betties, panadas and griddle cakes. The technique here, softening bread in hot milk and butter and then sieving it smooth, is the old panada of European cookery, used for centuries to bind forcemeats and thicken soups; lightened with whipped whites and baking powder it becomes a breakfast cake. The recipe calls for baking powder rather than saleratus and sour milk, the leavening that had become the ordinary default in kitchens of the period.