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Sweet Milk Griddle-cakes
3 cups flour 1½ tablespoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup sugar 2 cups milk 1 egg 2 tablespoons melted butter Mix and sift dry ingredients; beat egg, add milk, and pour slowly on first mixture. Beat thoroughly, and add butter. Cook same as Sour Milk Griddle-cakes. Begin cooking cakes at once or more baking powder will be required.
A straightforward buttermilk-free pancake batter from Fannie Farmer's book, leaning entirely on baking powder. The cross-reference to the sour milk version withholds the actual cooking method, so here it is.
- Cook at onceThe line about needing more baking powder if you wait is the hinge. Single-acting baking powder of the period released nearly all its gas on contact with liquid, so a batter left standing went flat. Most modern powders are double-acting and hold some lift for the griddle, but the batter is still best within ten minutes of mixing.
- How to cook themThe omitted instruction, from the sour milk recipe: drop by spoonfuls onto a hot greased griddle, cook until the surface is covered with bubbles and the edges look dry, then turn once and cook the second side. The book gives no temperature; on a modern griddle medium heat is right, and a drop of water should skitter rather than sit.
- Butter last, and warmButter last -- The recipe adds the melted butter after the batter has been beaten. Let it cool slightly before adding.
- SugarA quarter cup in three cups of flour is modest by current standards but enough to brown the cakes quickly. If your griddle scorches them before the centre sets, drop the heat rather than the sugar.
- Don't overbeatDespite the instruction to "beat thoroughly," with modern all-purpose flour mix only until the dry streaks disappear; a few lumps make a lighter cake.
- YieldAbout sixteen to eighteen cakes of four inches, serving four.
"Sweet milk" simply meant fresh, unsoured milk, a distinction worth making in kitchens where a crock of milk turning on the shelf was the normal state of affairs and sour milk with saleratus or soda was, by most accounts, a common leavening for griddle-cakes. Chemical baking powders became widely available in American kitchens over the second half of the nineteenth century, and recipes like this one mark the shift: the cook no longer had to wait for milk to turn, or judge how sour it was, to raise a batter. Fannie Farmer's insistence on level measurements and her warning that delay costs leavening are both characteristic of the Boston Cooking School's project, which was to replace kitchen judgement with figures a beginner could follow. The griddle itself was likely soapstone or heavy iron set over the range top, and cooks are often said to have greased it with a rind of salt pork rubbed across the surface between batches.