Mix in a bowl eight ounces of sifted flour, two ounces of sugar, two ounces of butter, a little salt, four eggs and two gills of milk; stir all well together to obtain a smooth paste. Beat one teaspoonful of flour with as much baking powder, add it to the other ingredients and when well mingled, cook and finish them the same as buckwheat cakes (No. 3272), serving them very hot.
A plain French-style griddle cake from Ranhofer's Epicurean — essentially a rich, eggy pancake batter leavened at the last moment. The measurements are by weight, which is the easiest part to work with; the cross-reference to No. 3272 is what hides the actual cooking method.
Galettes au froment means simply "wheat cakes," and the name is doing real work in this section — froment (wheat) distinguishes them from the buckwheat, rice and cornmeal cakes that surround them on the page. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York across two stints spanning roughly 1862 to 1896 and published The Epicurean in 1894, was writing for a clientele that expected French names on an American breakfast table, and the breakfast-cake chapter is a good picture of that hybrid: griddle cakes of every grain, given French headings and cooked by a method described once and then referred back to numerically throughout. The batter itself is a plain nineteenth-century pancake formula with the enrichment turned up — four eggs to half a pound of flour is closer to a hotel batter than a household one — and its chemical leavening marks the period neatly. The instruction to beat the powder with a spoonful of flour before adding it is the kind of step often said to date from a time when the stuff was less reliably blended.