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Egg Griddle Cakes
3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 3 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 cups milk 1 tablespoon sugar 2 eggs 2 tablespoons melted butter Sift flour, baking powder, salt and sugar thoroughly. Beat eggs, add milk, pour slowly on other ingredients. Mix thoroughly and add butter. Bake as for Bread Griddle Cakes.
A plain, sound pancake formula from a baking powder company's promotional booklet. Nothing in it has gone wrong with age, but two of its instructions assume knowledge the book supplies elsewhere.
- "Bake" means griddle-cookIn this book baking cakes on a griddle is simply cooking them; nothing goes in the oven. Heat a heavy griddle or skillet over medium until a drop of water skitters rather than sits, and grease it lightly.
- The missing cross-reference"Bake as for Bread Griddle Cakes" points to a companion recipe you may not have. Ordinary griddle-cake practice is to pour a scant quarter-cup per cake, cook until the surface is covered with broken bubbles and the edges look dry, turn once, and cook about a minute more.
- Level teaspoons are deliberateThe booklet insists on level measures throughout, and baking powder makers pressed the point against the older habit of heaping spoonfuls. Three level teaspoons to three cups of flour is one per cup, which is within the usual range; a heaped spoon can leave a metallic edge.
- Flour and thicknessThree cups of flour to two cups of milk gives a thick batter by modern standards, closer to a drop batter than a pour. If it mounds rather than spreads, thin with milk a tablespoon at a time.
- Mixing"Mix thoroughly" is the one line to disregard slightly. Stir only until the dry streaks disappear, then fold in the melted butter; a beaten batter turns the cakes tough and rubbery.
- Add the butter last, and warmMelted butter poured into cold milk-and-egg will seize into flecks. Let it cool to just warm and add it after the batter is combined, as written.
- YieldAbout eighteen four-inch cakes, enough for four to six people. Best cooked soon after mixing.
Reliable Recipes was one of the small booklets issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, founded in the late 1880s and for decades one of the largest American makers of double-acting baking powder, of the alum-phosphate type. Books of this kind were given away with the tin or mailed for a coupon, and recipes in them habitually name the brand in the ingredient list, which is why this one reads "3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder" rather than simply "baking powder." The insistence on level measurement served the maker as well as the cook: chemical leaveners had a reputation for bitterness and failure, and the companies had an interest in attributing failures to careless measurement. The recipe itself sits in a family of griddle cakes -- bread, buckwheat, rice, corn -- with the eggs here marking this as the richer version.