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Baking Powder Batter Cakes
Mix up, just before the cakes are wanted as in the preceding receipt, but without yeast. Just before you begin to bake add two or three large teaspoonfuls of baking powder, take the large wire egg whisk and beat the batter thoroughly-a vast improvement.
Hotel cooks probably have different estimates of the public likes and dislikes from other and domestic peoples'. Their opportunities are different. The conditions are different. The restraints are removed from the people who eat, and they indulge their tastes without the hindrances of economic considerations. The cooks know no individuals, but as the tide comes and goes they learn what the tide of humanity likes to consume the most of For instance, one favorite article which is not found half often enough is graham cakes.
A shortcut version of the book's yeast-raised griddle batter, for when there is no time to let a sponge rise. The whole method hangs on speed at the end.
- The hingeAdd the baking powder, whisk, and get the batter onto the griddle at once. Even modern double-acting powder loses some of its lift if the batter stands; the cream-of-tartar powders common in Whitehead's day acted fast and would have lost more of theirs.
- "The preceding receipt"A yeast-raised griddle batter; the page does not say what went into it. Here you build the same batter and leave the yeast out, so it needs no rising time at all.
- "Two or three large teaspoonfuls"Spoon measures of the period were not standardized and were often taken rounded or heaped, and the sentence gives no flour quantity. Work to the usual modern ratio instead: about 1 teaspoon of baking powder per cup of flour, or 1 1/4 teaspoons if the batter is thick.
- Beating thoroughlyWith a wheat-flour batter that goes straight to the griddle, brisk whisking does more good than harm; it disperses the powder evenly and lightens the batter with air. If the batter must wait even ten minutes, stop short of smooth to avoid a tough, gluten-worked cake.
- ConsistencyAim for a batter that pours in a ribbon and spreads to about a 4-inch round on its own. Thin with milk a spoonful at a time; a batter stiff enough to mound will not cook through before the outside colors.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 375F on an electric griddle, lightly greased. Turn once, when the surface bubbles have set and the edges look dry, and expect roughly two minutes on the first side and one on the second.
- YieldTwo cups of flour and about two cups of milk makes 14 to 16 cakes, enough for four people.
- Graham cakesThe closing aside points at the same batter made with graham flour. Substitute whole-wheat or graham flour for a third to a half of the white flour; more than that and the cakes turn heavy, since the bran cuts the gluten network.
Jessup Whitehead wrote from a Chicago hotel kitchen, and this entry shows it: the recipe is barely three lines, and the rest is a working cook's notes on what a dining room full of strangers actually orders. His distinction between hotel and domestic cooking runs through the entry, and his point about baking powder was a live one in the 1880s and 1890s, when chemical leavens had only recently become cheap and reliable enough to displace older methods of raising griddle cakes. The graham cakes he wishes were served more often take their name from Sylvester Graham, the 1830s temperance and dietary reformer whose advocacy of coarse unsifted wheat flour attached his name to it; by Whitehead's day graham flour was ordinary grocery stock rather than a reform cause.