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Griddle Cakes with Eggs
1 3/4 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 2 eggs 1 1/2 cups milk 1 tablespoon shortening Mix and sift dry ingredients; add beaten eggs, milk and melted shortening; mix well. Bake immediately on hot griddle.
A plain baking-powder pancake batter from a Royal Baking Powder promotional book, written when "bake" still meant "cook by dry heat," griddle included. Two notes matter most: the leavening quantity and the instruction to cook at once.
- "Bake immediately"This is the hinge. The tartrate baking powder Royal sold reacted almost entirely on contact with liquid, so a batter left standing went flat. Modern double-acting powder holds a second reaction for the heat, but the batter is still better cooked within a few minutes than rested.
- Baking powder amount3 teaspoons to 1 3/4 cups flour is about 1.7 teaspoons per cup, half again the modern ratio of roughly 1 teaspoon per cup, and calibrated for a single-acting powder. With today's double-acting powder, 2 teaspoons gives good lift.
- ShorteningIn 1920s usage this means any solid fat — lard, butter or the vegetable shortening then new on the market. Melted butter is the best-tasting choice here; melt it and let it cool slightly before adding, so it does not cook the eggs.
- Griddle heatThe book says only 'hot'; modern practice usually takes this as around 375F on an electric griddle, or a heavy pan where a drop of water skitters rather than sits. Grease sparingly; this batter has fat in it and a wet griddle steams rather than browns.
- Batter consistency1 1/2 cups milk gives a thin, pourable batter that spreads into wide, tender cakes. If you want thicker cakes, hold back a couple of tablespoons of the milk rather than adding flour.
- YieldAbout twelve to fourteen 4-inch cakes, enough for three or four people.
The New Royal Cook Book belongs to a large family of American cookbooks published by baking powder manufacturers, who had every reason to teach housewives recipes that used their product by the spoonful. Royal's powder was tartrate-based — cream of tartar plus bicarbonate of soda — and the company marketed it hard against the cheaper alum-phosphate powders, so its recipe pamphlets doubled as arguments for the brand. Egg-enriched griddle cakes like this one show the convenience of the chemical leaven: a griddle cake you could mix and cook in ten minutes was the selling point. The word "bake" for griddle cooking is an older usage, still standard in this period and preserved in names like the Welsh bakestone.