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Graham Bread Cakes
Make like the preceding, with part graham flour, and the crumbs of graham bread Corn cakes will be found, with other preparations of corn meal, near the end of this book.
Speaking of the way the English mis-call things, there is a very pretty London cook book making the remark that something in the batter cake line is baked on a "girdle" in Scotland, where "girdles" are in common use, but as they are little known in England the cake must be baked on the stove plate. The idea of calling a griddle a girdle! The griddle is in common use in New Jersey, but is little known in York State. And if no griddles in England what do they do for buckwheat cakes? Dreadful supposition-perhaps they have none! Time for somebody to start American kitchens over there. So that is the reason why Scotland is apostr phized as "Land o' cakes ! and John o'Groates," And barley bannocks; and England is not honored with any such title-how can she be, with no "girdles', What is home without a "girdle?" Her people are emigrating.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it points back to the preceding bread-crumb griddle cake, then wanders off into a complaint about British spelling. A few things have to be supplied before it can be cooked.
- The base recipe is missing here"Make like the preceding" refers to a griddle cake made with bread crumbs, but the page in front of us gives none of the proportions or other ingredients. Without that page, work from any bread-crumb griddle cake formula and substitute as directed.
- Graham flourCoarse, unsifted whole-wheat flour, still sold under that name. It absorbs more liquid than white flour and absorbs it slowly, so the batter will thicken as it stands and may need thinning.
- "Part graham flour" is genuinely vagueThe original gives no proportion. Half graham and half white is a safe working guess; all graham gives a heavy, gritty cake.
- Soak the crumbs firstGraham bread crumbs are drier and coarser than white. Cover them with warm milk and let them stand until they break down completely, or the finished cakes will be pebbly.
- Griddle heatA moderately hot, lightly greased cast-iron griddle. Whole-wheat batters tend to brown faster than white, so watch the first cake and lower the heat if it colors before the center sets.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. Scaled to about 2 cups of crumbs and 2 cups of milk you might expect somewhere around a dozen and a half cakes. Serve at once; graham cakes stiffen as they cool.
- The digressionAfter the opening direction and a cross-reference to the corn meal chapter, the rest of the entry is the author's editorial on the word "girdle." He is right that it is the Scots form of griddle, and wrong that England lacked them.
Graham flour and graham bread take their name from Sylvester Graham (1794-1851), the Presbyterian preacher and temperance lecturer whose dietary reform campaign urged coarse unsifted wheat meal, home baking, and abstention from meat, alcohol and stimulants. By the time this book was written the name had detached from the man and simply meant whole-wheat, which is why a cook could treat it as an ordinary shelf ingredient and use up the stale loaf in griddle cakes. The "Land o' Cakes" tag the author plays with was popularised rather than coined by Burns, who used it of Scotland in the 1780s and meant oatcakes; the phrase was already in circulation, Fergusson having used it before him. The cakes and bannocks the author lists were indeed baked on a girdle, the flat iron plate that English speakers south of the border came to call a griddle.