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Mollete
1/2 cup cold winter squash 12 1/2 cup milk 1 egg 1/2 cup corn meal 1/2 cup flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons baking powder Beat the squash with the milk and egg; add the other ingredients; mix all together into a smooth batter and bake in small cakes on a hot griddle. In Mexico these are served hot, with a little sugar sprinkled on each.
A squash griddle cake built on cornmeal and wheat flour in equal parts, closer to a corn pancake than to anything frozen. The batter is thick and the cakes are meant to be small.
- The milk quantityThe amount of milk is unclear as printed; the figure has been run together with a stray number. Start with 1/2 cup and add more a spoonful at a time until the batter drops thickly from the spoon, since squash varies a great deal in moisture.
- Winter squashAny dense orange squash works: butternut, kabocha, Hubbard. Cook and mash it, then let it cool and drain off free liquid before measuring, or the batter will be slack.
- CornmealUse fine or medium yellow cornmeal, not coarse polenta grind and not masa harina, which behaves quite differently. Letting the mixed batter sit ten minutes lets the meal hydrate and softens the grit.
- Griddle heatThe book says only "hot" and gives no figure; look for a surface where a drop of water skitters rather than sits. Cornmeal batters scorch faster than plain wheat ones, so keep the cakes small, about two inches, and turn once.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to one cup of combined flour and meal is a lot by modern standards, though plausible for a heavy squash batter. Cook the cakes soon after mixing rather than holding the batter.
- YieldRoughly a dozen small cakes, enough for two or three people as a breakfast or a sweet side.
- ServingSugar sprinkled over the hot cakes is the finish given here; cinnamon sugar or a little honey suits them equally.
Mollete is Spanish for a soft roll or small bread, and the word travelled to Mexico where it names various soft breads and, later, split rolls with beans and cheese. What is printed here is not that dish but a household griddle cake in the Mexican manner, of the sort often found among the "foreign recipes" pages of American loose-leaf cookbooks in the 1910s and 1920s. The squash-and-cornmeal pairing is genuinely old ground in Mexico and the American Southwest, where corn and squash were grown together long before wheat flour and baking powder joined them. Recipes like this one, adapted for a chemically leavened griddle batter, show a regional tradition being translated into the vocabulary of the early twentieth-century American kitchen.