Home › Griddle-Cakes › Flannel Cakes
Flannel Cakes
Make hot a pint of sweet milk, and into it put two heaping tablespoons butter, let melt, then add a pint of cold milk, the wellbeaten yolks of four eggs-placing the whites in a cold place-a tea-spoon of salt, four table-spoons potato yeast, and sufficient flour to make a stiff batter; set in a warm place to rise, let stand three hours or over night; before baking add the beaten whites; fry like any other griddle-cakes. Be sure to make batter just stiff enough, for flour must not be added in the morning unless it is allowed to rise again.
A yeast-raised pancake batter, closer to a blini than to a baking-powder cake, and the overnight rise is the whole point. The instruction that matters most is the warning at the end: once the batter has risen, adding flour ruins it, so get the consistency right before it goes to rest.
- Potato yeastA home-kept liquid starter of boiled potato, sugar and flour, roughly the strength of a loose barm. Four tablespoons is about a quarter cup of active liquid leaven; a modern stand-in would be a small quantity of instant or active dry yeast, or a fed sourdough starter with the flour and liquid adjusted elsewhere in the batter.
- Pints and "sweet milk"A pint is two cups, so this is a quart of milk in total. "Sweet milk" means ordinary fresh milk, named to distinguish it from the sour or buttermilk that leavened soda cakes.
- Heat the milk, then waitThe hot milk is there to melt the butter, not to warm the yeast. Adding the cold pint brings the whole to roughly blood heat; check it is no warmer than about 110F before the yeast goes in, and add the yolks at that point rather than into scalding milk.
- "Stiff batter"Stiffer than a modern pancake batter but still pourable, about the thickness of a thick cake batter that mounds briefly on the spoon. The recipe gives no flour quantity; add only enough to reach that consistency, and note that it slackens as it ferments.
- The riseThree hours in a warm room, or overnight at cool room temperature. It should be domed and bubbled, and it will smell faintly of beer.
- The whitesBeat to soft peaks and fold in just before cooking, in two additions, keeping the deflation to a minimum. They lighten the cakes at the griddle alongside the yeast's own gas.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 375F on an electric griddle, lightly greased. Watch the first cake and adjust.
- YieldA quart of milk plus four eggs makes a large batch, roughly 24 to 30 cakes of four inches. Halve it for a household of two or three.
Flannel cakes were a familiar American breakfast pancake before chemical leavening took over, and the name is often said to be simply descriptive: a soft, napped, slightly spongy cake with the texture of woollen flannel rather than the tighter crumb of a griddle cake raised with saleratus. Recipes like this one belong to a kitchen that kept a living leaven on hand, and potato yeast, a boiled-potato and sugar ferment renewed every week or so, was one household version in use in the late nineteenth century, before packaged compressed yeast became reliably available everywhere. The Dixie Cook Book was assembled in the 1880s from contributed receipts and prints several yeast-raised griddle cakes alongside quicker soda ones, which is a fair picture of a period in transition. The closing warning that flour must not be added in the morning is the voice of experience: unfermented flour stirred into a risen batter leaves the cakes heavy and raw-tasting, and the whole rise must be repeated to fix it.