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Pan Cakes
— Laura M. Harding
Two cups sifted flour, 2 tsp. Royal baking Powder, sift together. 1 egg, 1 cup milk, 2 tbsp. melted butter or other shortening, 1/2 tsp. salt. If not thin enough, add more milk. Beat well.
— Mrs. Mae Hammond
A plain community-cookbook batter with no cooking instructions at all — the contributors assumed every reader owned a griddle and knew what to do with it. A few notes fill the gaps.
- Baking powder amountTwo teaspoons for two cups of flour is at the low end of current practice, which runs from about a teaspoon to a teaspoon and a half per cup. Modern Royal is double-acting, so a batter made today will still rise on the griddle; the cream-of-tartar Royal of the period was effectively single-acting, so mix and cook promptly.
- "Royal Baking Powder"A brand named outright, as these books often did. Royal was sold as a cream-of-tartar powder rather than the soda-and-sour-milk leavening older recipes rely on. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes one for one.
- ConsistencyThe instruction to add more milk "if not thin enough" is the only real guidance given. Aim for a batter that ribbons off the spoon and spreads slowly — roughly heavy cream. One cup of milk to two cups of flour usually needs another two to four tablespoons.
- Beat well, then stop"Beat well" here means to work out lumps of flour, not to develop gluten. Mix until the dry streaks disappear and leave it; overworked pancake batter cooks tough and rubbery.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 375F on an electric griddle — a drop of water should skitter, not sit. Cook until the surface bubbles break and the edges look dry, two to three minutes, then turn once.
- Shortening"Other shortening" in community books of this era probably meant lard or a vegetable compound. Melted butter gives the best flavour; a neutral oil works and browns less aggressively.
- YieldAbout ten to twelve four-inch pancakes, enough for three or four people. The recipe scales cleanly if you are cooking for more.
- The two namesThe page carries attributions both above and below the ingredients. Treat it as one recipe, not two.
Philathea cook books were fundraisers for Philathea classes — adult women's Bible-study groups organized within the Baptist Sunday-school movement in the late nineteenth century, whose chapters spread across the United States and Canada and produced local cookbooks as a standard means of raising money. The recipes are short because they were copied from members' own kitchen habits rather than written for strangers, and they name brands freely: Royal Baking Powder appearing in the text is a fair marker of the period, when chemical leavening was increasingly taking the place of yeast and saleratus in everyday griddle cookery. Pancakes of this type — flour, egg, milk, a little fat, quick leavening — are the plainest form of a very old family of griddle breads, understood in the older manner as a bread of the meal rather than a dessert.