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Flannel Cakes
One and one-half pints of flour, one tablespoon brown sugar, one teaspoon salt, two teaspoons baking powder, two eggs, one and one-half pints milk. Sift together flour, sugar, salt and powder; add beaten eggs and milk, mix into smooth batter that will run from pitcher.
Bake on hot griddle rich brown color, in cakes large as tea saucers. Serve with maple syrup.
A plain baking-powder pancake batter, thinner than most modern ones. The proportions are given by volume in pints, which is the only real obstacle.
- Pints to cupsOne and one-half pints is 3 cups. So: 3 cups flour and 3 cups milk, an equal-volume batter that pours thin. Three cups of flour is roughly 12-13 oz by weight.
- "Bake on a hot griddle"Nineteenth-century cookbooks use "bake" for griddle cooking as readily as for oven work. A cast-iron griddle or heavy skillet at about 375F is right: a drop of water should skitter, not sit.
- The batter should runThis is the hinge. The instruction that it "will run from pitcher" is not incidental; flannel cakes are meant to be thin and tender, not thick and cakey. If it mounds on the griddle, thin it with more milk.
- SizeA tea saucer of the period ran roughly 5 to 6 inches across. Figure a scant 1/3 cup of batter per cake.
- Baking powderCommercial baking powder of this period was often single-acting, releasing its gas as soon as it was wetted rather than again in the heat. Two teaspoons to 3 cups of flour is on the light side by modern standards but works in a thin batter cooked promptly; do not let the batter stand long.
- EggsBeat the eggs before adding, as directed, and mix only until smooth. Some cooks of the period separated them and folded in the whites for extra lightness, which suits this batter.
- YieldAbout 18 cakes of the stated size, enough for four to six at breakfast.
Flannel cakes are usually said to take their name from the cloth -- soft, thin and slightly napped -- as opposed to the denser buckwheat cakes that shared the American breakfast table, though that derivation is traditional rather than documented. Older versions were raised overnight with yeast or a barm sponge, and the switch to baking powder, visible here, fits the general late-nineteenth-century shift toward quick batters that a cook could mix and pour in the same half hour. Maple syrup as the specified accompaniment suggests a northern setting, though it was sold well beyond the maple regions.