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Flannel Crumpets
Put one pound of sifted flour into a pan, mix into it one saltspoonful of salt, and put it in front of the fire; warm half a pint of milk, and with it mix the flour into a smooth batter. Beat up two eggs well, and stir them into three dessertspoonfuls of fresh yeast, or two dessertspoonfuls of dissolved German yeast, beat the mixed yeast and eggs into the batter. If the batter is stiff add a little more milk. Cover over the pan and set it near the fire until it rises well; then pour a ladleful of it onto a hot and greased baking-iron and bake slowly. When one side is done, turn and do the other side. Butter the crumpets, cut, and serve hot.
A yeast-raised griddle batter closer to what the English call a pikelet than to the ringed, holey crumpet sold today. Everything hinges on getting the batter loose enough and giving the yeast real time.
- The batter must be pourableOne pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups, and half a pint of milk is only 1 to 1 1/4 cups depending on whether the pint is American or imperial — either way, nowhere near enough. Expect to add milk until the batter drops from the ladle in a thick ribbon, perhaps 2 to 2 1/2 cups in total; the instruction "if the batter is stiff add a little more milk" is doing a lot of quiet work.
- Yeast conversions"German yeast" is compressed fresh cake yeast. A dessertspoon is about two teaspoons; note that the German yeast is called for *dissolved*, so the measure is of liquid rather than of cake yeast, and the quantity is small. About 2 teaspoons of instant dry yeast stirred into the warm milk will stand in. The larger quantity of "fresh yeast" probably refers to liquid barm or brewer's yeast, which no longer has a household equivalent.
- Small measuresA saltspoonful is 1/4 teaspoon. The salt goes in before the yeast has to work against it, which is fine at this level.
- Warming the flourSetting the pan before the fire simply brought cold flour and a cold kitchen up to blood heat so the yeast would move. In a modern kitchen, warm milk to about 100F and let the covered batter rise at room temperature — 1 to 1 1/2 hours, until domed and visibly bubbly.
- The baking-ironA greased griddle or heavy skillet at moderate heat. "Bake slowly" is the important part: too hot a pan sets the surface before the gas bubbles rise, and you lose the open crumb that makes the cake worth eating.
- Turning themUnlike ring crumpets, these are turned like a pancake — 3 to 4 minutes on the first side until the top is riddled with open holes and looks dry at the edges, then a minute or two on the second.
- YieldA pound of flour gives roughly 16 to 18 cakes about 4 inches across. Butter them the moment they come off the iron, while the holes will still take it.
Crumpets belong to the long British tradition of bakestone cookery — batters cooked on a flat iron or stone over the hearth, which predates the domestic oven in most households. The qualifier "flannel" is the giveaway to what this version is: nineteenth-century cooks used it for soft, spongy, cloth-textured griddle cakes, and American books of the period print "flannel cakes" for yeast-raised batter cakes of exactly this kind. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the dining rooms at the Waldorf and put his name to this 1896 collection, appears to have drawn on English and Continental household cookery for the breakfast and tea end of the book, and this reads like a British recipe transcribed with its dessertspoons and its "German yeast" intact. The reliance on the open fire for warming both flour and batter dates it more precisely than any of its ingredients do.