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Royal Hot Griddle Cakes
2 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 1/2 cups milk 2 tablespoons shortening Mix and sift dry ingredients; add milk and melted shortening; beat well. Bake on slightly greased hot griddle.
A plain baking-powder pancake batter from a Royal Baking Powder promotional book, written when 4 teaspoons of leavening to 2 cups of flour was a selling point. A few notes on the leavening, the fat and the griddle.
- Cut the baking powderFour teaspoons to two cups of flour is roughly double the modern rate. Part of the reason is that a single-acting cream-of-tartar powder gives up its gas all at once, and part of it is that the book existed to sell the stuff. Two teaspoons gives good lift; much more than that can leave a soapy, faintly metallic aftertaste.
- ShorteningIn books of this kind "shortening" usually meant lard, and in later printings could mean hydrogenated vegetable fat. Melted butter or a neutral oil works, two tablespoons as written.
- Batter consistency1 1/2 cups milk to 2 cups flour gives a middling pouring batter. Add another two or three tablespoons of milk if you want thinner, wider cakes.
- Do not overbeat"Beat well" is the one instruction to ignore. Stir only until the flour disappears; lumps are fine. Developed gluten makes rubbery pancakes, and a hard beating also knocks out the gas the powder has already generated.
- Cook promptlyBaking powder batters start working the moment liquid hits them. Get the batter onto the griddle within ten minutes or so rather than letting it stand.
- "Hot griddle"About 375F on an electric griddle, or medium on a heavy pan. A drop of water should skitter rather than sit and steam. Grease lightly and wipe the surface with a cloth between batches so the fat does not build up and fry the cakes.
- TurningTurn once, when the surface bubbles have opened and the edges look dry, roughly two minutes. A second flip presses out the lift.
- YieldAbout twelve 4-inch cakes, serving three or four.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets that Royal Baking Powder Company issued for decades from the late nineteenth century onward, given away free or sold for a few cents and built entirely around the product on the cover. Chemical leavening had transformed American breakfast cooking by then: griddle cakes that had once been raised overnight with a yeast batter or a saleratus-and-sour-milk reaction could now be mixed and cooked in a quarter of an hour. Royal's particular pitch was that it used cream of tartar rather than the cheaper alum powders of its competitors, a rivalry fought out in newspaper advertising and, at times, in state legislatures. The generous four teaspoons here should be read in that light -- these booklets were advertising as much as instruction, and the measurements reflect it.