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Sour Milk Cakes
1 pint sour milk. 1 pint flour. Butter size of a small egg. 1 tablespoonful of sugar. 1 saltspoonful of salt. Half teaspoonful of soda. Bake in hot and well greased iron clads.
A four-line batter of the kind every Virginia kitchen kept in its head. The instructions assume a screaming-hot greased iron pan, and that is the whole trick.
- Heat the pans first"Iron clads" are heavy cast-iron gem or muffin pans. Grease them and set them in the oven to heat empty until the fat shimmers, then pour in the batter; the cakes should hiss on contact. Cold pans give heavy, pale cakes that stick.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe specifies only 'hot' pans and gives no oven setting; a hot oven, somewhere around 400-450F, suits small cakes like these, which want to set and brown fast. Start checking at about 12 minutes.
- Sour milk means buttermilkSour milk -- nineteenth-century sour milk was raw milk soured naturally. Pasteurised milk left out spoils rather than sours, so cultured buttermilk is the usual modern stand-in, though it is not identical to clabber. A pint is 2 cups.
- Butter size of a small eggAbout 2 tablespoons, roughly 1 ounce. Melt it and let it cool slightly before it goes into the batter so it does not seize into flecks.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The sugar is a single tablespoon, so these are not sweet cakes; they are a bread to eat with butter.
- The soda is on the light sideHalf a teaspoon of soda to a pint of buttermilk is less than modern practice, which runs nearer half a teaspoon per cup. Expect a modest rise; if you want more lift, mix the soda into the flour and get the batter into the hot pans immediately, since the reaction with the buttermilk begins at once.
- The batter is thinEqual volumes of milk and flour make a pourable batter, closer to pancake consistency than muffin dough. That is intentional. Do not thicken it, and do not beat it past the point where the flour is wet.
- YieldEnough to fill a dozen or more standard gem cups, depending on their size. Serve straight from the pan; they toughen as they cool.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of recipes like this one: no title beyond the ingredient that prompted it, no yield, no times, because the cook was expected to know her own stove. Sour milk recipes existed because milk soured whether anyone wanted it to or not, and a household that skimmed cream for butter had clabbered milk to use up constantly. Pairing it with soda was the cheap chemical leavening of the century -- the acid in the milk and the alkali in the soda produce carbon dioxide directly, without waiting on yeast -- and saleratus, a related but distinct product sold as potassium and later sodium bicarbonate, still turns up in books of this vintage. "Iron clad" was a common name for heavy cast-iron gem pans, and the term is often said to come from the ironclad warships that were very much in living memory when this book was assembled, though that is folk explanation rather than established etymology.