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Rye Drop Cakes
2/3 cup rye meal 2/3 cup flour 2½ teaspoons baking powder 1 egg 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons molasses 1/2 cup milk Mix and sift dry ingredients; add milk gradually, molasses, and egg well beaten. Cook same as Fried Drop Cakes.
A small, stiff batter of rye and wheat sweetened with molasses, cooked by the method given under the companion recipe for Fried Drop Cakes. Everything hinges on the frying fat holding its heat.
- Baking powderThe printed page gives 2½ teaspoons of baking powder, as our text now reads.
- Rye mealRye meal is coarsely ground whole rye, distinct from the fine white rye flour sold in most supermarkets. Whole-grain or dark rye flour is the nearest substitute; a stone-ground rye meal from a mill or health-food aisle is closer still.
- The frying methodThe cakes are dropped by spoonfuls into deep fat and turned as they rise; the book itself gives no temperature. In a modern kitchen a thermometer helps: too cool and the batter drinks fat and goes heavy, too hot and the molasses in it scorches before the centre sets.
- Batter consistencyAdd the milk gradually as directed and stop when the batter drops thickly from the spoon rather than running. Rye is low in gluten and a slack batter will spread into ragged shapes in the fat.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter than the grocery molasses of the period. The molasses also darkens the cakes quickly, so judge doneness by time and by testing one cake rather than by colour alone.
- DonenessThree to four minutes total will cook a cake of about a tablespoon of batter through. Break the first one open before committing the rest; rye batters look done outside well before the middle sets.
- Yield and servingThe quantities make a modest batch, the count depending on how large the spoonfuls are. Drain on paper, serve hot, and pass maple syrup or more molasses.
Rye was the workhorse grain of New England kitchens long before wheat flour became cheap and reliable, and it kept a foothold in the region's cooking through the nineteenth century in company with molasses: rye-and-Indian bread, brown bread, rye griddle cakes, and small fried batters like this one. Fannie Farmer compiled the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book in 1896. That the rye version is sweetened with molasses rather than sugar is the older habit showing through, from the decades when molasses shipped up from the West Indies was the cheapest sweetening a New England household could buy.