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Flannel Cakes
1 quart of flour. 1 pint of meal. 1 teacup of milk. 1 teacup of yeast. 3 eggs. 2 teaspoonfuls of salt.
Beat well together and let it rise till usual time in a warm place. Excellent.--Mrs. W. B.
Another Recipe for Flannel Cakes. 1 quart of flour. 2 eggs. 1 1/2 pint boiled milk (used cold). 2 teaspoonfuls of salt. 3 tablespoonfuls of yeast (added after the other ingredients have been mixed). Beat light, and set to rise till morning. Bake on a griddle.--Mrs. Dr. J.
Another Recipe for the Same. 4 eggs. 1 quart of milk. Half teacup of butter or lard. 2 tablespoonfuls of yeast. 1 teaspoonful of salt.
Flour to make the batter like pound cake.--Mrs. S.
Three versions of the same thing: a yeast-raised griddle batter set overnight, softer and more open than a baking-powder pancake. The variations are useful mainly as a record of how loosely such batters were written down.
- Read the liquid as a guide, not a ruleThe first recipe pairs a quart of flour and a pint of cornmeal with a single teacup of milk, which cannot possibly wet it. Either a quart of milk was meant or the writer assumed the reader would thin the batter by eye; work to consistency instead, aiming for a batter that ribbons thickly off the spoon.
- Teacup and gillTeacups -- A teacup in this period is usually reckoned at roughly 3/4 cup, but such measures were not standardised in 1879, so treat the quantities as approximate.
- Meal means cornmeal"Meal" in a Virginia book is white or yellow cornmeal, not oatmeal and not more wheat flour. Fine grind gives the smoother crumb the name promises.
- The yeast is not a packetA teacup or tablespoonful of yeast meant liquid barm or a homemade potato-hop yeast, mostly water by volume. Substitute roughly 1/2 teaspoon of instant dry yeast for a long overnight rise, and add back the missing liquid as milk.
- Boiled milk, used coldBefore pasteurisation, scalding and then cooling the milk kept it from souring the batter. With modern milk the step is optional.
- Overnight riseSet the batter at cool room temperature, not in a warm place, if it is to stand ten or twelve hours. It should smell faintly of beer and be full of bubbles; stir it down gently rather than beating the gas out.
- Griddle heatMedium, lightly greased. Treat the first cake as a test cake.
- YieldA quart of flour makes a great many cakes, roughly two dozen of four inches and enough for eight people. Halve any of the three versions for a household breakfast.
Flannel cakes are generally said to have been named for their texture, soft and napped like the cloth, and they belong to the long era before chemical leavening displaced yeast at the breakfast table. Batter cakes raised overnight with barm were standard American griddle practice into the mid-nineteenth century; baking powder, widely sold from the 1860s, made the overnight step unnecessary and these recipes began to look old-fashioned almost as soon as they were printed. That Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) prints three of them, each contributed by a different woman and each contradicting the others, shows how the book was assembled: Marion Cabell Tyree collected recipes from some 250 Virginia housekeepers and set them down largely as received, initials and all, rather than testing or reconciling them. The mixture of wheat flour and cornmeal in the first version is a Southern habit, and the note that the milk is "boiled" and "used cold" is a quiet reminder of a kitchen with no refrigeration.