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Bread Griddle Cakes
1 1/2 cups flour. 1 cup milk. 1 cup stale bread crumbs 4 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons sugar 1/2 cup boiling water cup milk 1 egg, well beaten 2 tablespoons melted butter Add boiling water to stale bread crumbs, let stand 5 minutes, then add milk. Sift together flour, baking powder, salt and sugar, and add to bread mixture. Then add egg and butter. Bake immediately on hot griddle well greased. When full of bubbles, turn and cook other side. Add two or three tablespoons of melted butter, if richer and shorter cakes are desired.
A thrifty griddle cake that uses up dry bread, from one of the promotional baking powder books that shaped American home baking in the early twentieth century. It comes together fast, and it wants to be cooked the moment the batter is mixed.
- Mix and cook at onceChemical leavening in a thin batter starts working as soon as the liquid hits it. The instruction to "bake immediately" is the hinge of the recipe: batter left standing will spread thin and cook flat.
- Flour quantityThe method calls for flour sifted with the baking powder, but no amount is given in the list. For a batter of this size, roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of all-purpose flour is consistent with the other proportions; add it gradually and stop when the batter pours thickly from the spoon.
- Milk quantityThe list reads simply "cup milk", with the numeral apparently dropped in printing; 1 cup fits the rest of the proportions. Add it after the crumbs have softened in the boiling water.
- Bread crumbs"Stale bread crumbs" here means soft crumbs torn or rubbed from day-old bread, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters. Packaged dry crumbs will absorb far more liquid and give a pasty batter.
- Baking powderCalumet was an alum-phosphate powder (sodium aluminium sulfate with calcium acid phosphate) of the double-acting type, and a modern double-acting baking powder substitutes directly. Four level teaspoons is generous by current standards, and less will still leaven this batter.
- Griddle heatThe recipe says only "hot griddle": hot enough that a drop of water skitters. Turn when the surface is full of bubbles, as the recipe directs, and give the second side less time than the first.
- The extra butterThe closing line offers two or three more tablespoons of melted butter for richer, shorter cakes. That is in addition to the two already in the batter, and it does make them noticeably tender and more prone to browning quickly.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; expect roughly a dozen small cakes from this quantity of batter.
Reliable Recipes was published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, one of dozens of branded cookbooks that manufacturers distributed cheaply or free to put their product into the hands and habits of American cooks. Calumet, founded in the 1880s, competed hard against Royal and Rumford, and books like this one name the brand in the recipes that call for leavening. The dish itself belongs to an older tradition than the marketing: bread griddle cakes, sometimes called bread pancakes, were a standard way of using up stale loaf in an era when bread was baked at home or bought daily and nothing was thrown out. Softening the crumbs in boiling water before adding milk is the same technique used in bread puddings and panades, and it lets a cup of dry bread do the work of a good deal of flour.