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Sweet Milk Griddle Cakes
1½ cups flour or entire wheat 1 cup milk 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 egg 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons melted butter Mix and sift dry ingredients, add yolks well beaten, milk, whites well beaten, and melted butter. Cook as Griddle Cakes. 2 cups buckwheat
A plain baking-powder pancake batter, thin by modern standards and lightened by separating the egg. The instructions assume you have already read the master griddle-cake recipe elsewhere in the chapter.
- The stray line"2 cups buckwheat" at the end appears to belong to the next recipe rather than this one; nothing in the method uses it, so ignore it.
- Entire wheat flourThis is whole wheat. If you use modern whole wheat, letting the batter stand 10 minutes to soften the bran will give a less gritty cake.
- Separating the eggBeating the white separately and folding it in adds lightness alongside the baking powder. Fold rather than stir, and cook the batter promptly before the foam collapses.
- SaltA teaspoon in 1½ cups of flour reads as salty now; half that is closer to current taste, particularly if you are using salted butter.
- Griddle heatA cast-iron griddle or heavy skillet over medium heat -- a drop of water should skitter, not vanish instantly. Turn once, when the surface bubbles and the edges look dry.
- Batter consistencyOne cup of milk to 1½ cups flour gives a pourable batter that spreads into thin cakes. Add flour by the spoonful if you want them thicker; add milk if the whole wheat has drunk it up.
- YieldAbout ten 4-inch cakes, enough for two or three people.
"Sweet milk" in a 1900s cookbook simply means fresh milk, as distinct from sour milk or buttermilk — sour milk needed saleratus or soda to react with its acid, while sweet milk needed baking powder. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard; like most house cookbooks of the period it wrapped a full general-purpose collection of recipes around the company's product, so a bread chapter of griddle cakes and muffins sits alongside the chocolate work. The habit of beating egg whites separately for pancakes was standard in American cookery through the nineteenth century and later faded.