Home › Biscuits, Breakfast Cakes, Etc › Entire Wheat Griddle-cakes
Entire Wheat Griddle-cakes
½ cup entire wheat flour 1 cup flour 3 teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon salt 1 egg 3 tablespoons sugar 1¼ cups milk 1 tablespoon melted butter Prepare and cook same as Sweet Milk Griddle-cakes.
A straightforward baking-powder pancake batter that leans on the parent recipe for method. Two of the printed quantities have clearly suffered in transcription, so read them with care before you scale anything.
- The milk quantityThe printed page gives 1¼ cups milk, as our text now reads. That makes a fairly stiff batter with the 1½ cups of flour and meal here, so expect to thin it with a few extra tablespoons until it drops from the spoon in a thick ribbon.
- The salt1½ teaspoons of salt against 2½ cups of flour is high, and may be a misprint for ½ teaspoon. Reduce it unless you want a distinctly savoury cake.
- Entire wheat flourThis is whole wheat flour, though flour sold under that name was often a finer, lighter grind than much stone-ground whole wheat today. Modern whole wheat can absorb more liquid, which is another reason the batter may need loosening.
- The referenced methodThe parent recipe is not reproduced here; the usual method of the period is to sift the dry ingredients together, add the beaten egg mixed with the milk, then the melted butter last. Mix only until combined; whole wheat batter turns tough quickly.
- Resting the batterBran absorbs liquid slowly. Ten minutes standing before cooking lets the flour hydrate and gives a more tender cake, though it also costs a little of the baking powder's lift.
- Griddle heatA cast-iron griddle at 375F, or hot enough that a drop of water skitters, is right. Whole wheat and the three tablespoons of sugar brown faster than white flour cakes, so watch the first batch closely.
- YieldAbout sixteen cakes of three to four inches, serving four.
Entire wheat flour was something of a cause in late nineteenth-century America. Sylvester Graham had argued from the 1830s that unbolted wheat was morally and digestively superior to white flour, and by the end of the century the argument had settled into respectable middle-class practice: a household might eat white bread but serve entire wheat muffins, gems and griddle-cakes at breakfast. The book this page comes from treats it matter-of-factly, giving whole wheat versions alongside the white-flour originals and simply cross-referencing the method, which is why this entry is four lines long. The habit of building a chapter as a chain of variations on one parent recipe is characteristic of the book and of the cooking-school teaching it came out of, where students learned a proportion first and the substitutions afterwards.