Flannel Cakes
4 tablespoons butter 1 yeast cake dissolved in one quarter cup lukewarm water 3 cups scalded milk Scald meal with milk; add butter, and when lukewarm, add remaining ingredients; let mixture rise over night. In the morning cook as Griddle Cakes. 2 cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt
The ingredient list has been scrambled in transcription — the quantities appear both before and after the method — and one item called for in the instructions is missing from the list. Read it as a sponge set overnight and finished in the morning.
- The missing "meal"The method says to scald meal with milk, but no meal is listed. Flannel cakes of this period were commonly made with fine white cornmeal or with flour alone; here the 2 cups of flour is almost certainly what gets scalded. If you want the cornmeal version, substitute a half cup of fine cornmeal for a half cup of the flour.
- Batter thicknessThree cups of milk to two cups of flour gives a batter closer to cream than to pancake batter. Expect to work in another cup or so of flour in the morning, or accept very thin, lacy cakes.
- A yeast cakeOne compressed yeast cake of the period was about 0.6 oz, roughly equivalent to 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry yeast. Dissolve it in the quarter cup of lukewarm water as directed.
- Scalding milkScalding is usually explained as inactivating enzymes or denaturing whey proteins in raw milk thought to weaken gluten, though period cooks also scalded milk simply for safety and keeping. With pasteurized milk it serves mainly to heat the liquid for the flour, so bring it just to steaming rather than to a hard boil.
- Cool before the yeastThe instruction to wait until lukewarm is the hinge. Scalded milk at 180F will kill the yeast outright; the mixture should be at or below about 110F before the dissolved yeast goes in.
- Hold back the baking powderBaking powder stirred in at night will have lost most of its power by morning. Beat it in, with the salt, just before the cakes go on the griddle — it is there to lift a batter that has gone slack overnight, not to raise it.
- Overnight riseA cool room, around 65-68F, gives eight to ten hours of slow fermentation and the faint sourness that distinguishes these from a plain griddle cake. A warm kitchen will overproof the sponge and it will smell sharply of alcohol by morning.
- CookingA griddle at 375F, lightly greased. Cook until the surface is covered with broken bubbles, then turn once. Yields roughly 20 to 24 cakes, serving six.
Flannel cakes are the older American breakfast cake, raised with yeast overnight rather than with chemical leavening at the last minute, and the name is generally taken to describe the texture — soft, thick and slightly napped, like the cloth. Recipes for them run through nineteenth-century household books and hotel menus alike, and by the time this one was printed they were already being displaced by the quicker baking-powder griddle cake, which may be why baking powder turns up here alongside the yeast: perhaps a belt-and-braces insurance against a sponge that had gone flat by daylight. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it filled out its promotional chocolate recipes with a full complement of ordinary household cooking, breads and breakfast cakes included.