Home › Griddle-Cakes › Crumb Griddle Cakes
Crumb Griddle Cakes
The night before using put some bread crumbs to soak in one quart of sour milk; in the morning rub through a sieve, and add four well-beaten eggs, two tea-spoons soda dissolved in a little water, one table-spoon melted butter, and enough corn-meal to make them the consistency of ordinary griddle-cakes. It is better to beat yolks and whites separately, stirring the whites lightly in just before baking.-Mrs. H. Scoville, New Orleans.
A stale-bread pancake of the sort every 19th-century kitchen needed, thickened with cornmeal rather than flour. The batter is built the night before, so plan accordingly.
- The crumbs mean stale breadSoft crumbs torn or grated from a day-old loaf rather than dry packaged breadcrumbs. Perhaps 2 to 3 cups of loose soft crumbs to the quart of milk, though the recipe leaves the quantity open.
- Sour milk is buttermilkCultured buttermilk is the direct modern equivalent and supplies the acid the soda needs. Fresh milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup also works; sweet milk alone will leave a soapy, metallic taste from unreacted soda.
- Two teaspoons of soda is not a typoSpread across a full quart of acidic milk it works out at roughly half a teaspoon per cup, in line with usual practice for a heavy crumb-and-meal batter. Do not scale the soda up if you thin the batter. The recipe adds it dissolved in water along with the eggs and butter, before the meal goes in.
- Rubbing through a sieveThis is the step that makes the cakes tender rather than lumpy. A few pulses in a blender or a minute with a stick blender does the same job in less time.
- Cornmeal, added by feelThe amount is deliberately unspecified because bread varies. Start with about a cup of fine or medium yellow cornmeal and add more until the batter ribbons thickly off the spoon; let it stand ten minutes, since meal keeps absorbing liquid.
- "Baking" means the griddlePeriod usage. Cook on a lightly greased griddle or heavy skillet over medium heat until bubbles set at the edges and the underside is deep brown, then turn once.
- Whipped whites go in lastFold them in immediately before cooking and do not let the batter sit afterward, or the lift collapses. If you skip the separation the cakes still work, just denser.
- YieldA quart of milk makes a very large batch, roughly 24 to 30 cakes of ordinary size. Halve it for four people.
Griddle cakes built on soaked bread crumbs belong to the older tradition of using up the loaf rather than throwing it out, and cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s carry them under names like bread cakes, crumb cakes and stale-bread pancakes. The cornmeal here does the work that wheat flour does elsewhere, and the sour milk was a byproduct of home churning that a thrifty kitchen would not waste. The Dixie Cook-Book, first issued in the 1880s, gathered contributions credited by name and city, and Mrs. H. Scoville's New Orleans attribution is typical of how the book presented itself as a compilation of household practice rather than a single author's work. The overnight soak gave the bread hours to break down in the liquid, and the soured milk supplied the acid the soda needed.