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Batter Cakes
Beat thoroughly one teaspoon of soda with one and one-half pints of sour milk.
Beat the yolks of three eggs and add to the milk, then stir in the flour and a little salt, making the batter of the consistency of cake. Then beat the whites to a stiff froth, fold in, not thoroughly.-Mrs J. L.
Brenner, Dayton, O.
A contributor's recipe of the kind that assumes the cook already knows how a griddle works — no flour quantity, no pan, no heat. The essentials are recoverable, but two of them have to be estimated.
- Flour is unmeasuredWith 1½ pints (3 cups) of sour milk, batter "of the consistency of cake" lands around 3 to 3½ cups of flour. Add it gradually and stop when the batter ribbons thickly off the spoon rather than pouring in a stream.
- Sour milk is not spoiled milkIt meant naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Use buttermilk measure for measure, or 3 cups of milk with 3 tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes. Modern pasteurized milk left on the counter simply goes bad.
- Soda is doing the whole jobOne teaspoon of soda for 3 cups of buttermilk is on the low side by current practice; the beaten whites carry much of the lift. If your batter seems sluggish, add a half teaspoon of baking powder rather than more soda, which will taste soapy.
- Fold, do not stirThe instruction "not thoroughly" is deliberate. Streaks of unincorporated white are what make these cakes light; a smooth batter here is an overworked one. Cook the batter promptly after folding.
- Griddle heatThe recipe gives no cooking instruction at all; by modern griddle practice, medium heat (in the region of 375F), lightly greased. A drop of water should skitter and evaporate in two or three seconds. Turn once, when the surface bubbles and the edges set — roughly two minutes a side.
- The three yolks and no whites problemNothing here uses the whites separately beyond folding them in, so all six egg parts are accounted for. Beat the whites last so they do not deflate while you mix the batter.
- YieldAbout twenty-four cakes of three to four inches, serving six. The batter does not hold; cook it all at once.
"Batter cakes" was the common nineteenth-century American term for what most cooks now call griddle cakes or pancakes — the word distinguished a thin poured batter from the stiffer doughs of biscuits and muffins, and all of these were quick breads raised chemically rather than with yeast. The reliance on sour milk and soda points to a dairying household where milk soured routinely and the acid was too useful to waste; commercial baking powder existed by this period but soda plus a soured liquid remained cheaper. The signature of Mrs J. L. Brenner of Dayton, Ohio, marks this as a reader contribution, which is also why the recipe reads as one cook's shorthand rather than tested instruction — quantities that mattered to her are given, and everything she took for granted is left out.