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Graham Griddle-Cakes
One quart Graham flour, one tea-spoon baking powder, three eggs, and milk or water enough to make thin batter.
A three-line formula of the kind nineteenth-century cookbooks expected a cook to finish by eye. The proportions work, but the leavening is thin by modern standards and the batter's consistency is the only thing the recipe actually specifies.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume, not weight. A quart is 4 cups, which for graham flour scooped loosely is roughly 16 oz. Spoon it into the cup and level rather than dipping and packing.
- Graham flourWhole-wheat flour milled with the bran and germ intact, generally ground coarser than most modern commercial whole wheat. Ordinary whole-wheat flour works; it will give a slightly smoother cake.
- The baking powder is lowOne teaspoon to four cups of flour is a fraction of what a modern cook would use. Two to three teaspoons gives cakes that rise instead of merely setting, and the whole-grain flour needs the lift.
- Thin batter means thinAim for something that ribbons off the spoon and spreads on its own her. That will take a good deal of liquid for a full quart of flour — add it gradually and judge by eye rather than by a fixed measure. Whole-grain flour keeps absorbing liquid, so let the batter stand ten minutes and thin it again before cooking.
- Griddle heatMedium, in the region of 350-375F on an electric griddle. Whole-grain batters tend to brown faster than white-flour ones, so a very hot pan scorches the outside before the center sets.
- YieldA quart of flour makes a large batch: expect well over a dozen cakes of 4 inches, enough for a family breakfast.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer whose lectures in the 1830s and 1840s pressed Americans toward coarse unsifted wheat, cold water and abstention from meat and stimulants. By the later nineteenth century the moral crusade had faded but the flour had stuck, and "Graham" appears in American cookbooks of the period attached to bread, gems, muffins and griddle-cakes as a plain shorthand for whole wheat — by then generally offered as another breakfast option rather than as a health regimen.