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Corn Flake Griddle Cakes
1 cup flour. 1 cup corn flakes. 1 cup milk. 2 teaspoons sugar. 2 teaspoons butter. 2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1 egg Prepare and bake the same as Plain Griddle Cakes. Use any kind of package corn flakes, but dry them out if they have absorbed moisture. Any cooked cereal may be used in place of corn flakes. 1/2 teaspoon salt.
This entry is a fragment as printed: the ingredient list has lost everything but the baking powder and the egg, and the method points back to the book's Plain Griddle Cakes. Work from a standard griddle cake formula and treat the corn flakes as an addition.
- The missing ingredientsA Plain Griddle Cakes base of this era runs roughly 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 egg, and 1 1/2 to 2 cups milk, with a tablespoon of melted butter. The 2 teaspoons of powder in this entry is consistent with a flour quantity of around 2 cups, though the ratio is only a rough guide; anything else in the original list is genuinely lost, so do not guess at sugar or fat quantities and call them the book's.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was a double-acting powder of the sodium aluminium sulphate and acid phosphate type, and this book was published to sell it. Any modern double-acting powder substitutes one for one, but check the date on the tin — powder gradually loses lift once opened, generally within six months to a year.
- How much cerealThe quantity is not given. One to one and a half cups of corn flakes, lightly crushed, folded into a 2-cup-flour batter is a workable proportion; more than that and the cakes turn dry and refuse to spread.
- Drying the flakesThe instruction to dry out flakes that have absorbed moisture is the hinge of the recipe. Limp flakes dissolve into the batter and you lose the texture the dish exists for. Five to eight minutes in a 300F oven, spread on a sheet, restores the crispness.
- Fold the flakes in lastAdd them just before the batter hits the griddle. Left to sit, corn flakes soften and drink up the milk, and the batter stiffens into something you have to thin again.
- Griddle heatMedium, about 375F on an electric griddle — a drop of water should skitter, not vanish instantly. Watch cereal-studded cakes closely, as the exposed flakes on the surface colour before the batter does.
- The cooked cereal variationSubstituting cooked oatmeal or cream of wheat for the flakes changes the batter completely: cooked cereal brings its own water, so hold back a third of the milk and add it only if the batter is too thick to pour.
- YieldOn the reconstructed 2-cup-flour base, about 14 to 16 cakes of four inches, serving four; the original quantities are lost, so this is an estimate.
Reliable Recipes was one of the long series of promotional cookbooks issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, whose double-acting powder competed hard with cream-of-tartar brands in the first decades of the twentieth century; recipes in such books routinely name the sponsor's product by brand, which is why an otherwise ordinary griddle cake specifies "2 level teaspoons Calumet." The recipe also catches an American breakfast table in transition: flaked corn cereal, commercialised in Battle Creek in the early years of the century, had become cheap and widespread enough by the 1910s and 1920s that cookbooks began treating it as a pantry staple to be stirred into batters, meat loaf and cookies rather than merely poured into a bowl. The closing line about using "any cooked cereal" instead reflects an older thrift habit of working leftover porridge into the morning's pancakes.