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Griddle Cakes
cups flour, 1/2 tablespoonfuls baking powder, 1 2 2 2 teaspoonful salt, 1/4 cup sugar, cups milk, Blanchard heaping tablespoonfuls Evaporated Eggs dissolved in six tablespoonfuls water. tablespoonfuls melted butter.
Mix and sift dry ingredients, beat eggs, add milk and pour slowly on first mixture.
Beat thoroughly and add butter. Cook on a greased hot griddle. Serve with butter and maple syrup.
A plain baking-powder pancake batter, distinguished only by its use of a branded powdered egg. The quantities in the ingredient line have become detached from their ingredients, so treat the proportions as indicative rather than exact.
- The measurementsThe numbers in the ingredient list no longer line up with the items they belong to, and the flour and milk quantities in particular cannot be recovered with confidence. If you work from this page, lean on the method and judge the batter by consistency: it should pour thickly from a ladle and spread slowly on the griddle.
- Blanchard Evaporated EggsA dried whole-egg powder of the period, reconstituted here in six tablespoons of water. The number of heaping tablespoonfuls has been lost with the rest of the figures; six tablespoons of water suggests roughly two eggs' worth, so two fresh eggs is a reasonable substitute, with the milk cut back slightly to compensate.
- Baking powderPeriod baking powders varied in strength and composition, so a modern powder may not behave identically. Around a teaspoon of modern powder per cup of flour is the usual proportion; much more than that can leave a metallic aftertaste, so err downward rather than up.
- Griddle heatThe recipe says only 'hot griddle'; on an electric griddle something in the region of 375F suits pancakes, and a drop of water should sizzle briskly rather than sit. Grease sparingly with a wiped film of butter or lard; a pool of fat fries the outside before the centre sets.
- Mixing"Beat thoroughly" is the one direction to ignore. Overworking wheat batter develops gluten and gives tough, rubbery cakes; stir only until the dry flour disappears and accept a few lumps.
- Butter lastThe melted butter goes in after the batter is mixed, as written. Adding it to cold milk sets it into flecks that never disperse.
- YieldIf the batter was built on two cups of flour, that would give roughly sixteen four-inch cakes, enough for four; the flour quantity is missing from the page, so this is only an estimate. Baking-powder batters lose lift on standing, so cook them soon after mixing.
Cookbooks of this period were often part cookery, part advertising: manufacturers supplied recipes, and sometimes underwrote the books, on condition their products appeared by name. Blanchard's evaporated egg answered a genuine problem, since fresh eggs before refrigeration were seasonal, expensive in winter and unreliable in transit. Dried egg powders were promoted to housekeepers as economical and dependable, and they appear to have seen heavier use in institutional and wartime cooking than in domestic kitchens. Griddle cakes themselves were a standing American breakfast long before the branded shortcut, leavened with sour milk and saleratus in earlier decades and shifting to baking powder as it became cheaper in the later nineteenth century.