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Bread-Crum Griddle-Cakes
1 1/2 cups stale bread-crums 1 1/2 cups scalded milk 2 tablespoons shortening 2 eggs 1/2 cup flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 4 teaspoons baking-powder Soak the crums in the milk and fat until they are soft. Add the eggs, well beaten, and the dry ingredients, mixed and sifted. Drop the batter, by spoonfuls, on a hot, greased griddle. When the cakes are full of bubbles, turn them and brown on the other side. The cakes are very tender and should be turned carefully.
A thrifty batter that turns stale bread into something closer to a soufflé pancake than a flapjack. The whole recipe hinges on temperature: the crumb-and-milk mixture must cool before the eggs go in.
- Let the soaked crumbs coolScalded milk is near 180F, hot enough to scramble the eggs on contact. Soak the crumbs, then let the mixture come down to warm — barely above body temperature — before beating in the eggs.
- What "bread-crums" means hereSoft crumbs torn or grated from day-old bread, not the dry sandy sort sold in canisters. Dry commercial crumbs absorb far more liquid and will give a stiff, pasty batter; if that is all you have, use about 1 cup and expect to add milk.
- Why scald the milkScalding is usually explained as a holdover from the era of unpasteurized milk, and hot milk certainly softens crumbs faster. With modern milk you can simply heat it to steaming for the soaking, and no more.
- The baking powderFour teaspoons to half a cup of flour reads extravagantly, but the leavening here has to lift a heavy, wet crumb mass rather than flour. It works.
- ShorteningAny neutral solid fat or butter, melted into the hot milk. Two tablespoons is about 1 oz.
- Griddle heatMedium — around 375F on an electric griddle. These cakes are wetter than a standard pancake batter and scorch before they set if the pan is too hot.
- TurningThe warning is earned: there is little gluten structure holding these together. Keep the cakes small, no more than 3 inches across, turn when the surface is well covered with bubbles and the edges look dry, and use a wide thin spatula.
- YieldEnough for three or four people. Serve at once with syrup, honey or stewed fruit; they collapse and toughen as they sit.
Bread-crumb griddle cakes belong to a long tradition of recipes designed to use up stale bread, which in a household baking its own loaves several times a week was a constant surplus rather than an occasional scrap. Cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are full of such uses — bread puddings, brown betties, panadas, scalloped dishes — and the griddle cake is among the most direct: soften the crumb in hot milk, bind it with egg, lift it with baking powder, and it passes for a breakfast dish in its own right. The New Delineator Recipes came out of a women's magazine kitchen, at a time when domestic-science teaching was a strong influence on such books. The characteristic softness the note warns about is the point: crumb-based cakes have almost no gluten network, so they eat tender in a way a flour pancake does not.