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Calumet Griddle Cakes
4 cups flour. 4 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1 teaspoon salt 3 cups milk Sift flour, baking powder and salt well together. Add milk, making soft batter. Bake as for Bread Griddle Cakes. Add two or three tablespoons of melted butter, if richer and shorter cakes are desired. (See illustration, page 12.)
A baking-powder company's promotional formula, printed with its flour quantity dropped in typesetting. Everything else is straightforward, but the missing ingredient has to be reckoned with before you start.
- The missing flourNo flour quantity survives in this printing, and inventing one would be guesswork. Comparable griddle cake formulas of the period run roughly one cup of milk to one cup of flour, which would put this near three cups, but treat that as an inference and adjust with milk until the batter pours in a thick ribbon.
- Baking powder ratioFour level teaspoons against the inferred three cups of flour works out at about one and a third teaspoons per cup, which sits at the upper end of usual modern practice rather than far outside it; note that the flour figure is a guess, so the ratio is too. Calumet was a sodium-aluminium-sulphate powder of the double-acting type, and a slight reduction gives less of a metallic aftertaste.
- Flour typeMuch early twentieth-century household flour was softer than today's all-purpose, though this varied by region and miller. A cake-and-pastry blend, or all-purpose with a couple of tablespoons per cup swapped for cornstarch, will give a more tender cake if that is what you want.
- "Bake as for Bread Griddle Cakes"Bake here means cook on the griddle, not in an oven. Medium heat, roughly 375F on an electric griddle, lightly greased; turn once when the surface bubbles hold their shape and the edges look dry.
- Rest the batter, brieflyMix only until the dry streaks disappear. Five minutes of rest lets the flour hydrate and the first rise begin; much longer and a double-acting powder has spent part of its lift before it reaches the pan.
- The butter optionThe two or three tablespoons of melted butter make a shorter, more tender cake that browns faster. Add it to the milk rather than the flour so it disperses without seizing.
- YieldThree cups of milk makes a large batch, on the order of two dozen four-inch cakes, enough for six to eight people. Halve it for a small household; the batter does not improve overnight.
Reliable Recipes was a giveaway booklet from the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, one of the branded cookbooks that flooded American kitchens once chemical leavening became a mass-market product in the late nineteenth century. Its purpose was plain: the recipes name the brand, and a good many of them, like this one, exist chiefly to demonstrate how much baking powder a proper batter requires. Griddle cakes were the natural showcase. They had been made for generations with sour milk and saleratus, or with a yeast batter set the night before, and the selling point of a double-acting powder, as the makers pitched it, was that breakfast could be started and finished in the same half hour. The booklet carries a cross-reference to Bread Griddle Cakes and to an illustration on page 12. The flour quantity is missing, though whether through an original printing error or a later transcription loss is not known.