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Griddle Cakes
Mrs. Orson Smith.
Two quarts warm water, one teaspoon salt, one cup flour, one cup corn meal, one-half teacup yeast, two eggs well beaten and added the last; raise over night.
A yeast-raised overnight batter of the kind that preceded baking powder pancakes. The proportions as printed are the first thing to reckon with.
- The liquid looks wrongTwo quarts of water to two cups of flour and meal gives a batter thinner than milk, which will not hold a cake on the griddle. Either the flour quantities are shorthand for "flour and corn meal enough to make a batter" — a common omission in contributed recipes — or a line was dropped in setting the type. Expect to work up to roughly a quart of dry mixture per quart of liquid, half wheat flour and half corn meal.
- A teacup of yeastHalf a teacup of yeast -- This is liquid yeast: home-brewed barm or a purchased yeast cake dissolved in water, perhaps a third of a cup of active slurry. About half a teaspoon of instant dry yeast in the sponge does a similar job over a full night at room temperature; much more than that and the batter risks over-fermenting and turning sour and flat by morning.
- Warm, not hot"Warm water" here means roughly blood heat. Water much above 120F starts to stress the yeast and above about 140F kills it outright; a batter set with hot water simply sits.
- Order of operationsThe recipe's "added the last" is ambiguous: it may mean the eggs go in last of the ingredients before the batter is set to rise, or that they are beaten in at the griddle in the morning. Beating them in in the morning avoids leaving beaten eggs eight hours at room temperature.
- Overnight in a cold kitchenThe recipe assumes an unheated kitchen at perhaps 60F. A modern 70F room ferments faster; a sour, alcoholic smell in the morning means it went too far. Setting the covered bowl in the refrigerator overnight and pulling it out an hour before breakfast gives a closer result.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 375F on an electric griddle, lightly greased. An overnight batter can take colour quickly, and a scorching griddle gives a dark cake with a raw center.
- Corn meal textureNineteenth-century corn meal was stone-ground and coarser than most supermarket meal. If the cakes come out gritty, letting the meal soak in a little of the warm water for twenty minutes before the batter is mixed softens it.
- YieldMade up as a workable batter, this quantity is a family breakfast — perhaps two dozen cakes of five or six inches. Leftover batter can be kept back as a starter for the next night's setting.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named local women, sold to raise money for the Home for the Friendless — one of the earliest and most imitated American charity cookbooks, and the reason so many of its entries read like a note passed between neighbors rather than formal instruction. Yeast-raised griddle cakes set overnight were the ordinary breakfast standard before chemical leavening took over; the cook kept a jar of liquid yeast or a cup of last night's batter going more or less permanently, and the mixture of wheat flour with corn meal reflects both cost and taste, corn being cheap and giving the cakes a coarser, sweeter crumb. Recipes of this kind assume a great deal of shared knowledge — how stiff the batter should be, how warm the kitchen — which is exactly the knowledge that vanished when packaged baking powder made the overnight sponge unnecessary.