Home › Breads, Biscuit and Rolls › Sweet Milk Griddle Cakes
Sweet Milk Griddle Cakes
Take two cups of milk; one egg; flour to make a thin batter; one-half teaspoon of salt; one tablespoon of melted butter and one and one-half teaspoons of baking powder. Beat the eggs well, and stir them into the milk. Add the salt and the baking powder, and enough flour to thicken, and lastly, stir in the melted butter. Too much flour should not be used, if a light, thin cake is desired. It is wise to bake one cake first, to see if the batter is thick enough and the griddle sufficiently heated.
A plain pancake batter with the flour left to the cook's judgment, which is the whole difficulty of the recipe. A few notes make it repeatable.
- "Sweet milk" means fresh milkThe term distinguishes it from sour or buttermilk, which older recipes leaven with saleratus or soda instead of baking powder. Any whole milk works; the batter is richer with it than with skim.
- How much flourThe original gives none. For two cups of milk, start with about 1 3/4 cups (roughly 220 g) of all-purpose flour and stop when the batter pours in a ribbon and spreads on its own. The instruction not to overdo it is the point of the recipe.
- Mix the powder into the flourThe text has you add baking powder to the milk before the flour. It disperses far more evenly if whisked into the dry flour first, which also spares you lumps of unactivated powder.
- Leavening ratioOne and a half teaspoons for nearly two cups of flour is lean by current practice, which runs closer to a teaspoon per cup. Two teaspoons gives a lighter cake without a metallic edge.
- Griddle heatAbout 375F, or a surface that makes a flick of water skitter rather than sit and steam. The test cake the recipe calls for is worth the minute it costs: it tells you both the heat and the batter thickness.
- TurningFlip once, when the surface is matte and the bubbles that rise stop closing over, usually two to three minutes. Repeated flipping is generally held to compress the crumb.
- YieldAbout fourteen cakes of four inches, serving three or four. The batter is best used soon after mixing, as it loses some of its lift on standing.
Butterick, the pattern company, published its cook book as part of a broad line of household manuals aimed at the same middle-class readership that bought its dress patterns, and the pancake chapter reflects a kitchen in transition. For most of the nineteenth century griddle cakes were leavened either with yeast set overnight or with sour milk and saleratus, the acid in the milk doing the work; commercially blended baking powders, widely available from the later 1800s, made a batter that could be mixed and cooked in ten minutes. The careful specification of sweet milk in the title may well have served to distinguish this recipe from the older sour-milk formula, though that is an inference rather than something the book states. The advice to bake one cake first as a test is standard in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery, when flour varied in absorbency from sack to sack and a griddle's temperature could only be judged by eye.