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Flannel Cakes
Beat two eggs in a bowl and add a teaspoon of salt, a tablespoon of sugar and a pint and a half of milk, with a teaspoon of cream tartar and half a teaspoon of soda; add flour to make a thin batter. Bake on a greased griddle, spread with butter, and send to the table hot.
A plain pourable pancake batter leavened with cream of tartar and soda rather than commercial baking powder. The only real decisions are how thin to make it and how hot to run the griddle.
- Measure the milkA pint and a half is 3 cups. That is a lot of liquid; expect to add a roughly comparable volume of flour, adding it gradually until the batter is thin but no longer watery.
- "A thin batter"Aim for something that ribbons off the spoon and spreads on its own to a thin round, thinner than a modern buttermilk pancake batter.
- Cream of tartar and sodaA teaspoon of cream of tartar with half a teaspoon of soda is roughly equivalent to about 2 teaspoons of modern baking powder. The recipe adds both to the milk; whisking them into the flour instead keeps the soda from reacting before the batter is mixed.
- Mix and cook promptlyThis is single-acting leavening: the acid and soda spend themselves as soon as they are wet. Get the cakes onto the griddle within a few minutes rather than letting the bowl stand.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 375F, is right. A drop of water should skitter and vanish; if it sits and steams the cakes will be pale and tough.
- Grease sparinglyWipe the griddle with a fat-dampened cloth between batches rather than pooling butter or oil, which fries the edges and leaves them lacy and brittle.
- Butter and serve"Spread with butter" most likely means buttering the cakes as they come off the griddle, while they are still hot enough to melt it through.
- YieldAbout 18 to 20 thin cakes, enough for four to six people at breakfast.
"Flannel cake" was a common nineteenth-century American name for a thin, soft griddle cake, the name often said to come from a comparison of the texture to the nap of flannel cloth; the term appears in cookbooks and hotel breakfast bills of fare, often alongside buckwheat cakes as the lighter, wheat-flour alternative. The cream of tartar and soda here mark the recipe as transitional: home bakers had been combining the two by hand to imitate the lift of a yeast batter without the overnight wait, and by the time this book appeared the same two chemicals were already being sold premixed in a tin. Older versions of flannel cakes were raised with yeast and set to rise overnight, and many nineteenth-century recipes for them insist the batter be thin.