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Crumb Griddle Cakes
3/4 cup bread crumbs 1 cup milk 1/2 tablespoon butter 1 egg 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup flour 2 teaspoons baking powder Cook the crumbs, milk and butter for fifteen minutes; rub through a sieve; cool and add the yolk of the egg and the dry ingredients sifted. Fold in the white and bake on a hot griddle.
A thrift recipe that turns stale bread into a tender pancake. The crumb panada does most of the work, so the flour is only there to bind.
- "Bake on a hot griddle" means fryIn this period bake was often used loosely for cooking on a griddle or in a spider. Nothing goes in the oven. The recipe asks only for a hot griddle: hot enough that a drop of water skitters.
- Use dry, plain crumbsThese should be stale bread ground fine, not seasoned commercial crumbs and not panko, which stays coarse. Three-quarters of a cup of dry crumbs is roughly 3 oz, though crumb density varies.
- Cook the crumbs gentlyFifteen minutes of crumbs, milk and butter over direct heat will scorch and stick. A double boiler, or the lowest burner setting with frequent stirring, gives the smooth paste the sieving step assumes.
- The sieve step is worth doingRubbing the cooked panada through a sieve is what makes the finished cake tender rather than gritty. A food mill or a few pulses in a blender does the same job.
- Cool before the yolk goes inThe mixture must be no more than lukewarm or the yolk will curdle into threads. Spreading it in a shallow bowl speeds this up.
- Cook promptly once the white is foldedBaking powder of this period was often single-acting, and the recipe relies on the beaten white for lift. Get the batter onto the griddle within a few minutes rather than letting it stand.
- ConsistencyBread crumbs vary a great deal in how much milk they absorb. Expect a thick batter that spreads slowly; loosen with a spoonful or two of milk if it will not pour.
- YieldRoughly eight small cakes, enough for two, depending on how thickly the batter is dropped.
Crumb griddle cakes belong to the large family of American breakfast batters built on a panada ‑ bread softened and cooked down in milk ‑ a technique that reaches back well before the cookbook era and shows up in everything from forcemeats to bread puddings. The point was economy: a household baking its own bread had stale ends every few days, and grinding them into crumbs was routine kitchen work rather than a special effort. Books of this generation seem often to carry several crumb variants, alongside rice, hominy and cornmeal cakes, all of them ways of stretching flour with something already paid for.