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Breakfast Cakes
Mrs. Rice.
One cup milk, one pint flour, three eggs, piece butter size of an egg, two teaspoons cream tartar, one teaspoon soda, one tablespoon butter.
A bare ingredient list of the kind common in community cookbooks, where the method was assumed known. It is a quick-bread batter leavened with cream of tartar and soda, meant to be mixed and baked at once.
- The hinge: mix last, bake firstCream of tartar and soda react as soon as they meet the liquid, and unlike modern double-acting baking powder they get no second lift in the oven. Have the pans greased and the oven hot before the dry and wet mixtures meet, then bake immediately.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume, so a pint means 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz of all-purpose flour depending on how it is scooped. Spoon and level rather than packing the cup.
- Butter size of an eggThat is about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. The recipe then calls for a further tablespoon of butter; it may be intended for greasing the pans or griddle rather than the batter, but the list does not say.
- The leavening in modern termsOne teaspoon soda with two teaspoons cream of tartar is the standard 1:2 ratio and is equivalent to roughly 4 teaspoons of baking powder. Sift both thoroughly through the flour; undispersed soda leaves bitter yellow streaks.
- What the pan should be"Breakfast cakes" of this kind could go into gem or muffin pans, or shallow cast-iron cake irons heated in the oven; the term was elastic and similar batters were also cooked on a griddle. Cast iron preheated before the batter goes in gives a crisper exterior.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A hot oven, around 425F, for 15 to 20 minutes suits a batter this size; test with a straw or skewer at the centre.
- YieldEnough for about a dozen standard muffin cups, or eight to ten larger gems.
Cream of tartar and saleratus were the working leaveners of the mid-nineteenth-century North American kitchen, and recipes like this one sit at the moment just before commercial baking powder swept them aside. Cream of tartar, a byproduct of winemaking scraped from the inside of the cask, was sold at the grocer's alongside soda, and the cook combined them herself in the 1:2 proportion; packaged baking powder simply premixed the two with a starch to keep them dry. The Home Cook Book published in Toronto later in the 1870s in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, and credited to the ladies of Toronto and other cities and towns, was based on the Chicago Home Cook Book of 1874, which had itself been compiled from recipes contributed by ladies of Chicago and other cities and towns; its entries carry their contributors' names as a form of credit and warranty. "Breakfast cakes" was an elastic term covering anything quick, small and hot that came to the table with the morning meal.