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Bread-Crum Griddle-Cakes
1½ cups stale bread-crums
½ cup flour
1½ cups scalded milk
½ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons shortening
4 teaspoons baking-powder
2 eggs
Soak the crums in the milk and fat until they are soft. Add the eggs, well beaten, and the dry ingredients, mixed and sifted. Drop the batter, by spoonfuls, on a hot, greased griddle. When the cakes are full of bubbles, turn them and brown on the other side. The cakes are very tender and should be turned carefully.
A thrift recipe that turns the heel of a loaf into breakfast. The batter is soft and short on gluten, so the handling matters more than the mixing.
- The hinge: let the crumbs swellThe crumbs must soak until no gritty pieces remain, five to ten minutes in the hot milk. Undersoaked crumbs give a batter that looks right but cooks into cakes with hard specks through them.
- Use real stale bread"Stale bread-crums" here most likely means soft crumbs torn or grated from day-old bread, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in a canister. Dry commercial crumbs absorb more liquid; if that is all you have, expect to need extra milk.
- Scalded milk, then coolScalding is often explained as a holdover from the days of raw milk; whatever its origin, hot milk does soften the crumbs faster and melt the shortening. Let the mixture drop to lukewarm before the beaten eggs go in, or they may curdle.
- ShorteningTwo tablespoons of any solid fat: butter, lard or vegetable shortening. Butter gives the best flavour and browns the cakes a shade faster.
- The baking-powder is highFour teaspoons to half a cup of flour reads alarmingly, but the flour is only a binder and the leavening has to lift the whole weight of the wet crumbs. With modern double-acting powder, three teaspoons is plenty; more than that leaves a metallic edge.
- Griddle heatThe recipe calls for a hot, lightly greased griddle; in modern terms a moderately hot surface, in the region of 375F. Too hot and the outside sets before the crumb-heavy centre cooks through.
- TurningThe warning is genuine. These have almost no gluten structure, so slide a wide thin spatula fully under each cake and turn in one movement. Cakes of three to four inches are easier to manage than large ones.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a dozen or more cakes depending on size, enough for three or four at breakfast. They are best straight from the griddle; reheated they turn dense.
Griddle-cakes built on soaked bread rather than flour belong to a long tradition of using up the loaf, one that runs from medieval sops through bread puddings and panades to the wartime economies of the twentieth century. The Butterick book was published by the same firm that sold dress patterns to American housewives. Chemical leavening was cheap and reliable by the early 1900s, and four teaspoons of baking-powder in a single batch of cakes shows how freely a cook could reach for a tin that her grandmother had not owned.