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Entire Wheat Griddle Cakes
1 cup entire wheat flour 1 cup bread flour 3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 2 tablespoons sugar 1 egg 2 cups milk 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon melted butter Sift together flour, baking powder, salt and sugar. Beat egg; add milk, and pour slowly upon first mixture. Beat thoroughly and add butter. NOTE-Graham Flour Cakes can be made as above, substituting Graham for Entire Wheat Flour. 2 eggs, well beaten 1 cup sweet milk
A straightforward pour batter from a baking-powder company's promotional booklet. Two things need translating: the flour names, and the stray line of type at the end.
- The trailing fragmentThe last line, "2 eggs, well beaten 1 cup sweet milk," does not fit this batter and appears to be stray type from an adjacent recipe on the page. Use the one egg and two cups of milk called for above.
- Entire wheat flourThis is whole wheat flour, ground and sifted finer than graham. Modern whole wheat flour substitutes directly; if yours is coarse stone-ground, let the batter stand ten minutes so the bran softens.
- Graham flourThe note offers graham as an alternative. Graham is whole wheat with the bran left coarser, and it gives a nubblier, nuttier cake. Where it is sold today it is often milled much like ordinary whole wheat.
- Bread flourPeriod bread flour was a strong wheat flour; all-purpose is the better modern choice here, since griddle cakes gain nothing from high gluten and turn tough with overbeating.
- Baking powder amountThree level teaspoons for two cups of flour is a heavy hand by modern standards; two teaspoons is generally enough, and three can leave a metallic taste.
- Sweet milkWhere the book says sweet milk it means fresh, unsoured whole milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabber then common in kitchens.
- Beating and resting"Beat thoroughly" was written for a lump-prone flour and a whisk, not a stand mixer. Mix until just smooth, stir in the butter last, and cook within twenty minutes while the powder is still active.
- Griddle heat and yieldA greased griddle at about 375F, or hot enough that a drop of water skitters, is right; whole wheat browns faster than white flour, so watch the first cake. The batter makes roughly fourteen to sixteen four-inch cakes, serving four.
Reliable Recipes was one of the small booklets issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, and its leavened recipes call for the brand by name — an early and very effective form of ingredient advertising, of the same family as the flour and cornstarch pamphlets of the era. The recipe's real interest is its flours: "entire wheat" and graham were the health flours of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, graham being generally traced to Sylvester Graham, the reformer who preached unsifted wheat meal in the 1830s. By the time this booklet appeared, whole-grain griddle cakes had shed most of their reforming zeal and were simply a familiar breakfast, sweetened with a couple of spoons of sugar and lifted with the sponsor's product.