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Clam Pancakes
2 cans of clams (2 lb. size). 1 pound of flour. 1 pint of the clam liquor 1 pint of milk. Salt. 10 yolks of eggs. 4 ounces of butter, melted. A spoonful of syrup. 1 heaping teaspoonful of baking powder.
Cut or chop the clams a little larger than beans. Mix the batter as for other batter cakes, and the clams at last, and bake on a griddle. There is a biographical dictionary across the street, but no use looking in that for Sally Lunn. Who was she? A muffin peddler? Some common body, else she would not have been called Sally. Perhaps a female "good fellow," who invited folks to take a cup o' tea. Maybe a village Hampden or a Howard, or a female Cromwell guiltless of anybody's blood, yet a great backbiter. But "no further seek her merits to disclose;" she might turn out to have been like a certain Aunt Melissy of Pennsylvania, recently sketched in a magazine, who kept boarders, was famous for her savory pot-pies and doughnuts, but who sold whiskey and swore terrifically.
A large-batch griddle cake from a professional bakeshop manual, built on canned clams and a great many egg yolks. The stray paragraph about Sally Lunn belongs to a neighboring entry and has nothing to do with the clams.
- Scale it downA pound of flour with a quart of liquid and ten yolks yields something like three dozen cakes. Quartering the recipe gives a household batch: about 1 cup flour, 1/2 cup clam liquor, 1/2 cup milk, 2 to 3 yolks, 1 oz melted butter.
- "2 cans of clams (2 lb. size)"Nineteenth-century can sizes were nominal, and the drained meat weighs considerably less than the size stated on the can. Aim for roughly 1 lb of drained chopped clams total, which is about four to five 6.5 oz supermarket cans.
- A pint of clam liquorThose cans will not give you two full cups of juice. Make up the difference with bottled clam juice rather than water, or the cakes lose most of their savor.
- LeaveningOne heaping teaspoon of baking powder to a pound of flour is light by modern standards. Use about 1 teaspoon per cup of flour.
- The spoonful of syrupAt this quantity it adds little sweetness; most likely it is there to help the cakes take color. A tablespoon of light corn syrup, cane syrup or molasses in the full batch, and keep the griddle moderate.
- Chop, don't mince"A little larger than beans" is the instruction that matters. Pieces of about 1/2 inch stay distinct in the short time on the griddle; cut too fine, they disappear into the batter.
- Fold the clams in lastAs written: add them after the batter is combined.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 350 to 375F, lightly greased. Two to three minutes a side; the clams are already cooked, so you are only setting the batter.
- ServingThe book gives no clue. These are savory cakes, not breakfast pancakes — serve with lemon, tartar sauce, or a little melted butter and pepper.
The American Pastry Cook is one of Jessup Whitehead's Chicago trade manuals of the 1880s and 1890s, written for hotel and restaurant bakers, and its rambling asides — here an unrelated riff on the identity of Sally Lunn, which looks to have spilled over from a neighboring entry — are part of the house style. Clam cakes and clam fritters belong to a long New England shore tradition, but a recipe like this one, calling casually for two large cans, could only have been written after commercial clam canning took hold in the second half of the nineteenth century and put shellfish on inland menus year-round. The batter itself is a rich egg-yolk griddle batter adapted to a savory purpose; the touch of syrup may well be a baker's trick for color rather than a sign that the cakes were meant to be sweet, though the recipe does not say.