Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Cornmeal Butter Cakes
Cornmeal Butter Cakes
Place one pound of cornmeal in a basin with one-half pound of wheat-flour, one teaspoonful of baking-powder and one pinch of salt. Stir slowly into the above ingredients one quart of milk, or milk reduced with water, and then add one teacupful of melted lard. When well mixed and smooth, spread the mixture out on iron plates in thin cakes and cook them over a slow fire. When done on one side, turn and cook the other. These cakes are very palatable when served hot.
A plain griddle cake from the Waldorf's kitchen, given in weights and "teacupfuls" as a professional cook would have worked. A few of the proportions need attention before the batter behaves.
- Weights to cupsOne pound of cornmeal is about 3 cups; a half pound of wheat flour is about 1 3/4 cups. Weighing is more reliable here, since cornmeal packs unevenly.
- A teacupfulIn American kitchen writing of this period a teacup is roughly 3/4 cup, not a full measuring cup. That still means about 6 ounces of melted lard for the batch, which is a great deal of fat by modern standards; half of it produces a cake that still browns well and tastes less greasy.
- Leavening is shortOne teaspoon of baking powder for a pound and a half of meal and flour will barely lift the batter. Modern baking powder is used at roughly 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup of flour, so 4 to 5 teaspoons is closer to what these cakes want.
- Iron platesRead this as a cast-iron griddle or heavy skillet. Oscar's kitchen worked on a flat-topped range where a cook could choose a cooler spot; on a modern burner, medium-low to medium heat is the nearest equivalent to his "slow fire."
- Why slow mattersCornmeal batter scorches before the interior sets if the griddle is too hot. The cakes should take three to four minutes on the first side and show a dry, dulled edge before turning.
- Let the batter standGive the mixed batter 10 to 15 minutes so the meal hydrates. Untreated coarse cornmeal is otherwise gritty, and the batter will thicken noticeably as it sits -- thin it with a little more milk if it stops spreading.
- LardRendered lard gives the flavor and the crisp edge intended. Butter will brown faster and burn more readily at this quantity; a neutral oil is the closest neutral swap.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts of batter, a hotel-scale batch. Halve or quarter it for a household, and serve straight off the griddle with butter, syrup or molasses.
Oscar Tschirky's book gathers the Waldorf's own service alongside the broad American repertoire of 1896, and cornmeal cakes belong firmly to the second group: a griddle bread of the sort eaten at breakfast and supper across the country long before it reached a Fifth Avenue hotel. Cornmeal was the cheap staple grain of the American table, and recipes like this one -- meal stretched with wheat flour so the cakes hold together and turn without breaking -- sit at a point where chemical leavening was well established, though the older reliance on eggs, yeast or a hard-beaten batter persisted alongside it. The instruction to spread the batter on "iron plates" rather than a pan is a reminder that the recipe was written for a coal or wood range with a flat cooking surface, where a cook judged heat by where on the top the food sat.