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Sour-milk Griddle-cakes
1 cup thick sour milk 1 egg cup any cooked About cup flour teaspoonful soda cereal teaspoonful salt 4 Beat sour milk, cereal, and egg well together.
Sift flour and salt and add them. When ready to bake the cakes add the soda and beat the batter vigorously. It should look like thick cream. too thin add a little more flour, and if too thick add more sour milk or a little water.
Bread Griddle-cakes (with Sour Milk) See page 150.
A thrift pancake built on leftover cooked cereal — oatmeal, cream of wheat, hominy grits — bound with soured milk and just enough flour to hold it. The quantities in the ingredient column have not all survived legibly, so treat the batter description, not the numbers, as your guide.
- Judge by the batter, not the cupThe instruction that matters is "it should look like thick cream." Cooked cereals vary enormously in how much liquid they hold, so start with roughly half a cup of cereal to one cup of sour milk and one egg, then bring it to that consistency with flour or extra milk.
- Thick sour milkThis means naturally clabbered raw milk, which no longer exists on shelves. Full-fat buttermilk is the closest match; plain kefir or thinned whole-milk yogurt also work. Soured pasteurised milk is not the same thing and turns unpleasant rather than tangy.
- Soda quantityThe usual rule of thumb is about half a teaspoon of baking soda to one cup of sour milk or buttermilk. Much more than that tends to leave a soapy, metallic taste and a greyish crumb.
- Add the soda last, and bake at onceThe direction to hold the soda until baking time is deliberate. The lift comes from soda meeting the acid in the milk, and it is largely spent within a few minutes, so the griddle should be hot before the soda goes in.
- Cooked cerealUse it cold and break up any lumps in the milk before the flour goes in; a whisk or a brief mash with a fork is enough. Cold porridge in clots will not disperse once the batter thickens.
- Griddle heatMedium; a drop of water should skitter rather than vanish instantly (roughly 375F on an electric griddle). Cereal cakes tend to brown faster than plain flour cakes, so at high heat they can scorch before the centre sets.
- YieldAbout ten to twelve cakes of three inches, enough for two or three people.
Sour-milk griddle-cakes belong to the era before reliable refrigeration, when milk soured on the shelf as a matter of course and the kitchen found uses for it rather than throwing it out. The acid did double duty: it flavoured the batter and it activated the baking soda that was in common household use in American baking by the middle of the nineteenth century. What places this particular version in a book of left-overs is the cooked cereal — a breakfast porridge, congealed in the pot overnight, reappearing at the next morning's breakfast in a different shape. The same logic produced bread griddle-cakes, rice cakes and hominy cakes across the genre.