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Bread Griddle Cakes
Put stale bread through the food chopper until 1 pint of crumbs has been obtained. Add enough cold water to just moisten them, and let stand for a little while. Then add 1 egg, 2 cupfuls of sour milk, 2 teaspoonfuls of soda and flour enough to thicken. Serve with maple syrup.
A thrift recipe that turns dry bread into a soft, tender pancake. The batter is deliberately loose and vague, so the two things to control are the soda and the final thickness.
- A pint of crumbsThat is 2 cups by volume, loosely packed — roughly 3 to 4 ounces of dry bread, or about four thick slices. A food chopper is a hand-cranked meat grinder; a food processor pulsed a few times does the same job.
- Sour milk means buttermilkIn the period this meant raw milk left to clabber on its own. Pasteurized milk today spoils rather than souring cleanly, so use cultured buttermilk. Two cups of whole milk soured with 2 tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar will also work, though the acidity is less reliable.
- Cut the sodaTwo teaspoons of soda against 2 cups of buttermilk is more than the acid can neutralize, and the excess tastes soapy and can discolour the cakes. One teaspoon is closer to right; 1¼ if you like a very open crumb.
- "Flour enough to thicken"Expect about 1 to 1½ cups of all-purpose flour. Aim for a batter that falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon — thinner than a drop-biscuit dough, thicker than a crêpe batter. The soaked crumbs will keep absorbing liquid, so judge the consistency after they have sat.
- Soak, then moveGive the moistened crumbs ten to fifteen minutes to soften, but once the soda goes in, cook promptly. The lift comes from soda meeting acid and it starts dying immediately; a batter left standing half an hour will give flat, heavy cakes.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 375°F on an electric griddle. These brown faster than a plain flour pancake because the bread already carries cooked starch and sugar, so they will scorch on a hot pan before the centre sets.
- YieldSomewhere around sixteen to twenty cakes of 4 inches, depending on how thick the batter is run — enough for four.
Griddle cakes built on stale bread belong to a long line of kitchen economies aimed at the bread crock, the same impulse that produced bread pudding, panada and brown betty. Before sliced commercial loaves, a household baked or bought whole loaves and always had a heel or two going hard, and a hand-cranked food chopper — widely sold and clamped to many kitchen tables by the 1910s — made short work of turning them into crumbs. The sour milk is the other half of the thrift: in dairying households milk that had turned was a resource, not a loss, and its acid was a common partner for baking soda in an era when commercial baking powder was a bought expense. Maple syrup as the finishing note suggests a northern American setting, though syrup was shipped and sold well beyond the regions that produced it.