Home › Left-Over Cereals › Farina Pancakes
Farina Pancakes
1 cup sweet milk 1 cup flour 1 cup cooked farina 1 egg 2 teaspoonfuls baking-1 teaspoonful salt powder Beat the egg and farina together until light and smooth, and stir in the milk. Sift the flour and salt together and add to the farina mixture. When ready to bake the cakes, stir in the baking-powder and beat the batter vigorously. These cakes will be found much more digestible than those made entirely of raw flour.
Hominy and Cheese Soufflé 1 cup cooked hominy 1 cup grated cheese 1/4 cup hot milk Grated rind of half a Salt, paprika lemon 1 cup grated cheese 2 eggs With a fork beat up the cold hominy and the hot milk until very smooth. Add seasonings and grated cheese. Separate the eggs and beat the yolks until thick and light, and stir into the mixture. Then fold in the stiffly beaten whites, pour into a buttered baking-dish, and bake in a hot oven until firm in center-about twenty minutes. Serve at once. This may also be cooked satisfactorily in a chafing-dish.
A thrifty griddle cake that stretches a cup of leftover breakfast farina into supper. The batter is thin by modern pancake standards and wants a hot, well-greased surface.
- FarinaFarina is a coarse-ground wheat middlings cereal, sold now as Cream of Wheat or plain farina. Cooked and chilled it sets into a stiff mass; break it up thoroughly with the egg before any liquid goes in, or you will be picking lumps out of the batter.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabbered milk a period kitchen also kept on hand. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- The mixed ingredient lineThe quantities run together in the original: it is 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder and 1 teaspoonful salt. The salt is sifted with the flour, the baking powder held back until the griddle is hot.
- Why the baking powder waitsModern double-acting baking powder gives a second lift in the pan, so the delay matters less than it did with the single-acting powders of the period. It still does no harm, and vigorous beating just before cooking keeps the cakes light.
- Griddle heatMedium-high, around 375F on an electric griddle, lightly greased.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; roughly a dozen cakes of four inches, enough for three or four at breakfast. The batter does not hold well; cook it out once the powder is in.
- The soufflé that followsThe souffle that follows -- The book gives no temperatures; a 'hot oven' of this period is generally taken as somewhere in the region of 400 to 450F, and twenty minutes at that heat should set a shallow dish of hominy and cheese. The milk quantity appears to have lost its fraction in the ingredient list -- probably a half cup of hot milk to a cup of cooked hominy -- and the grated cheese is listed twice, so one cup is likely what is meant.
Books of this kind appeared in quantity around the turn of the twentieth century, when domestic-science writers were preaching against the household waste they saw as a moral as much as an economic failing. Cooked breakfast cereals were the standing example: farina, oatmeal and hominy were made in quantity, congealed in the pot by mid-morning, and went into the bin unless the cook had a plan for them. The claim that these cakes are "more digestible than those made entirely of raw flour" reflects the era's preoccupation with digestibility, a notion pressed hard by the domestic-science movement; the starch in the already-cooked farina is indeed gelatinized, which is the grain of truth under the argument.