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Bread Griddle-cakes
1½ cups fine stale bread crumbs 1½ cups scalded milk 2 tablespoons butter 2 eggs ½ cup flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 4 teaspoons baking powder Add milk and butter to crumbs, and soak until crumbs are soft; add eggs well beaten, then flour, salt, and baking powder mixed and sifted. Cook same as other griddle-cakes.
A stale-bread batter cake from Fannie Farmer's 1896 school book, leavened hard to lift the weight of soaked crumbs. Two things need attention before you start: the flour quantity as printed, and the fact that the original assumes you already know how to run a griddle.
- Flour quantityThe printed page was checked: the flour is ½ cup, as our text now gives. That yields a thick but pourable batter, with the soaked crumbs doing most of the work; judge by consistency and add a spoonful more flour only if it runs thin.
- Scalded milkHeated to just below boiling, about 180F, until it steams and shows bubbles at the rim. Originally done to kill enzymes in raw milk; here its real job is to soften the crumbs quickly, so hot milk still earns its place.
- Fine stale bread crumbsSoft crumbs from day-old white bread rubbed through the hands or pulsed in a processor, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in a can. Packaged dry crumbs absorb far more liquid and will give a pasty cake; if that is all you have, expect to loosen the batter with extra milk.
- Let the crumbs actually soakTen to fifteen minutes, until no dry centres remain when you press a crumb against the bowl. Crumbs that go onto the griddle still firm stay gritty in the finished cake, and no amount of cooking will fix it.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons reads as extravagant, but the batter is heavy with soaked crumbs and the single-acting powders of the period released their gas differently from modern double-acting ones. If it seems excessive, three teaspoons of modern powder should do. Mix and sift it with the flour and salt as directed, and cook the batter promptly rather than letting it stand.
- "Cook same as other griddle-cakes"A moderately hot, lightly greased griddle, hot enough that a drop of water skitters. Pour in rounds, cook until the surface bubbles and the edges look set, turn once. Crumb cakes can colour faster than a plain flour cake, so keep the heat a touch lower than usual.
- YieldNot stated in the original. Best eaten straight from the griddle; the crumb structure goes damp if the cakes are stacked and held.
Griddle-cakes made from stale bread belong to a whole family of nineteenth-century kitchen economies built around not throwing bread away — bread puddings, brown betties, panadas, crumb griddle-cakes. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book of 1896 sits at the point where that thrift met the new gospel of exact measurement: the book is remembered chiefly for insisting on level cups and spoons rather than the older handfuls and lumps the size of an egg, and for the chemical leaveners that had reshaped American breakfast baking over the previous half-century. Cream of tartar and soda, and then commercial baking powder, made it possible for a household to put a hot cake on the table in minutes without yeast, and the breakfast-cake chapters of American cookbooks swelled accordingly. This particular recipe does two jobs at once — it clears the bread box and fills the griddle — which is exactly why it earned its place in a school text meant for young women learning to run a household on a budget.