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Oatmeal Pancakes
2 C sour milk. In the morning add- 2 eggs, well beaten 1 C flour 1 t salt Bake on hot griddle.
Mrs. A. Huss. 2 C oatmeal soaked over night in sour milk 1 t baking powder 1 t soda 1 C flour
A church-supper pancake built on the old overnight-soak method, printed here with its lines out of order — the ingredient list runs after the instructions, and "1 C flour" appears twice. Read it as: soak 2 cups oatmeal in sour milk overnight; in the morning beat in 2 eggs, 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon baking powder and 1 teaspoon soda; bake on a hot griddle.
- The missing quantityNo amount of sour milk is given. Two cups of rolled oats need roughly 2 to 2½ cups of liquid to swell overnight into a thick, spoonable mush; start at 2 cups and judge in the morning. This is a genuine gap in the original, not a conversion problem.
- The duplicated flour"1 C flour" is listed twice, once among the morning additions and once in the trailing ingredient list. Note that "Mrs. A. Huss." falls between the two blocks, so the page may be running the end of one recipe into the beginning of another rather than scrambling a single list; if you treat it as one recipe, one cup of flour is enough.
- Sour milkPeriod sour milk was raw milk left to clabber, mildly acidic and thick. Buttermilk is the direct substitute; failing that, a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice stirred into a cup of milk and left ten minutes will do the same work of activating the soda.
- Both soda and baking powderThe soda neutralises the acid in the soured milk and the baking powder supplies backup lift for a batter this heavy. Do not drop either. Mix them in at the last moment and cook promptly — the soda reaction begins as soon as it meets the acid.
- Which oatmeal"Oatmeal" in an American community book of this sort may mean rolled oats or cut/ground oats; rolled is the likelier reading and the easier one to work with. Steel-cut will also work with an overnight soak but yields a chewier, grittier cake; instant oats collapse into paste and are the one form to avoid.
- Griddle heatThe original says only "hot griddle." In practice a dense oat batter does better at a moderate heat than the high heat used for thin white-flour pancakes, since a very hot pan browns the outside before the middle sets; allow rather longer on the first side than for a wheat pancake.
- Batter consistencyAfter soaking, the mixture will be much stiffer than a wheat batter and the cakes will need spreading with the back of a spoon. Thin with a little extra milk if it will not spread at all.
- YieldNo yield is given. Depending on how much milk is used for the soak, expect somewhere in the region of a dozen to twenty small cakes.
Overnight-soaked oatmeal pancakes belong to a thrifty tradition of using up two things at once: leftover cooked porridge or dry oats, and milk that had gone sour before refrigeration made that a problem rather than a resource. Soured milk was an asset in a soda-leavened kitchen, and recipes calling for it are everywhere in American church and community cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Oats themselves arrived in the American breakfast in bulk after the 1870s, when steam-rolling and national brand marketing turned a horse feed and a Scottish staple into a cheap, quick cereal. A book like this one — with a name attached, here Mrs. A. Huss — preserved exactly this kind of household shorthand, in which the amount of milk needed to soak a bowl of oats went unwritten.