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Pumpkin or Squash Griddle Cakes
1 cup sifted cooked pumpkin or squash, 1 cup milk, 1 egg, pinch of salt, 1 tbsp. sugar, 1/2 tsp. soda. Flour enough so they will fry thin.
— Mrs. John Legg
A community-cookbook batter written for a cook who already knows what pancake batter should look like. The only real judgment call is the flour, which the recipe declines to measure.
- Flour, roughly"Enough so they will fry thin" lands at about 1 to 1 1/4 cups of all-purpose flour with this much liquid. Add it gradually and stop when the batter pours in a ribbon rather than a mound; pumpkin holds water, so a wet purée will take more.
- Soda without acidHalf a teaspoon of baking soda has little to react with in plain sweet milk (pumpkin purée is only mildly acidic) and can leave a soapy, faintly yellow taste. Recipes of this period often assumed sour milk or buttermilk even when they wrote only "milk"; if you are using fresh milk, either sour it with a spoonful of vinegar or lemon juice, or substitute baking powder at about 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup of flour.
- Sifted cooked pumpkinThis means pumpkin boiled or baked until soft and pushed through a sieve — the equivalent of plain canned pumpkin purée, not pumpkin pie filling, which is already sweetened and spiced. Drain a watery homemade purée in a sieve before measuring.
- Squash as an equalThe squash intended here is a dense winter type — Hubbard, buttercup, butternut. Summer squash is too wet and bland to substitute.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 375F on an electric griddle. There is only a tablespoon of sugar in the batch, so it is chiefly the purée that colors quickly; these can brown sooner than a plain pancake and look done while the center is still raw.
- Cooking cueBecause the batter is thick with purée, the surface bubbles are fewer and slower than in a plain cake. Turn when the edges look set and dry rather than waiting for a field of broken bubbles.
- YieldAbout twelve to fourteen cakes of four inches, serving three or four. The batter thickens as it stands; thin with a spoonful of milk between batches.
- SeasoningThe original is unspiced, which suits a breakfast cake served with butter and syrup. A half teaspoon of cinnamon or a scrape of nutmeg is in keeping if you want it sweeter in character.
Pumpkin and winter squash were kept in cellars through the cold months across the American North and Midwest, and cooks found ways to work them into everyday food rather than reserving them for pie — griddle cakes, biscuits, doughnuts, steamed puddings. Adding cooked vegetable or leftover porridge to a pancake batter stretched flour and eggs, an old habit of thrift that shows up in nineteenth-century books as rice and hominy cakes as well. The signature at the end, Mrs. John Legg, is the whole point of such a book. Recipes in this format assume a great deal of the reader — no yield, no pan temperature, no flour measurement — because they were written for neighbors who had watched the same batter come off the same kind of griddle all their lives.