Farina Cakes
Melt together one pint of milk and one tablespoonful of butter. Then add four tablespoonfuls of farina and boil till quite thick. Set aside to cool. When ready to bake, add three well beaten eggs, a few spoonfuls of flour, and salt to your taste.--Mrs. S.
A thick semolina panada enriched with eggs and fried or baked in small cakes — closer to a fritter than a pancake. The recipe assumes the cook knows what "bake" meant on a nineteenth-century griddle.
- FarinaIn American books of this period farina means finely milled wheat semolina, the same product later sold as Cream of Wheat. Modern semolina or farina cereal both work; do not substitute cornstarch or potato starch, which will not set the same way.
- QuantitiesOne pint of milk is 2 cups. Four tablespoons of farina to a pint is a fairly modest proportion, so the recipe's instruction to 'boil till quite thick' is doing the work: cook it until the mixture holds a track from the spoon before you set it aside.
- Cooking the baseRain the farina into the hot milk while whisking, or it will lump. It needs 5 to 8 minutes of gentle boiling, stirred constantly, to hydrate the grain; undercooked farina stays gritty no matter how long the cakes fry.
- Cool it fullyThe instruction to set aside to cool is the hinge. If the eggs go into a warm base they scramble and the batter breaks. Cool to room temperature, or chill, before beating them in.
- "A few spoonfuls of flour"Genuinely vague. Start with 2 tablespoons and add only enough to make a batter that drops thickly from a spoon; too much flour turns the cakes tough and pasty.
- "When ready to bake"'Bake' here most likely means cook on a hot greased griddle or in shallow butter in a skillet, over medium heat, a few minutes a side until well browned, though the text does not rule out oven baking. They are heavier than a wheat pancake and need lower heat and longer than one.
- Yield and servingPerhaps a dozen small cakes, serving three or four, though the recipe states no yield and no serving method. The base contains no sugar, so any sweetening would come at the table.
Farina cakes belong to a large family of nineteenth-century dishes built on a cooked cereal panada — milk thickened with grain, cooled until firm, then bound with egg and fried. The same method produces Italian gnocchi alla romana, German Griessschnitten and countless "rice cakes" and "hominy cakes" in American manuscript cookbooks. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, is a collection of contributions from Virginia households, and the attribution "Mrs. S." is typical of the book's structure: hundreds of named and initialed contributors, each supplying a family formula written for someone who already knew the technique. Farina itself was a fashionable pantry item in the post-war decades, marketed as a light, digestible food for invalids and children, and many recipes of the era treat it as a versatile base for puddings, gruels and cakes rather than a breakfast cereal in its own right.