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Valable Recipes
three eggs, beaten separately, one teaspoon soda, a little salt, flour enough to make a thick batter.
This is a contributor's shorthand of the kind that fills community cookbooks: proportions only, no liquid, no method, no pan. It can be cooked, but the cook is expected to supply most of it.
- The missing liquidA batter of three eggs and flour alone will not pour. No liquid is named; in this book's idiom it is left to the cook, and with soda as the only leavening the likeliest choice is sour milk or buttermilk — perhaps a cup to a cup and a half for three eggs. There is no way to recover the author's figure, or to be sure one was intended; treat this as a ratio to work from rather than a formula.
- Soda needs an acidOne teaspoon of soda with sweet milk gives a soapy, faintly yellow crumb and very little lift. Buttermilk, sour milk or clabber is what makes this work. With sweet milk, baking powder is the usual equivalent, about three teaspoons.
- A teaspoon then and nowPeriod spoon measures were unstandardised, and a teaspoon may well have been rounded rather than level. One level modern teaspoon of soda is the sensible reading here; more will taste metallic.
- Eggs beaten separatelyThis means yolks beaten into the batter and the whites whipped and folded in at the last moment. Much of the aeration is mechanical, with the soda working alongside it. Fold, do not stir, and cook promptly.
- What "a thick batter" meansThick enough to drop from the spoon in a lump rather than a ribbon: griddle-cake or fritter consistency, not pancake pour. If it is being used as a coating batter for fruit or oysters, it should just cling to a dipped piece.
- How to cook itThe book gives no vessel. Proportions like these could serve several ways — dropped on a greased griddle, spooned into hot fat as fritters, or baked in a hot dish with meat drippings as a batter pudding. Griddle cakes over medium heat are the safest assumption.
- YieldOn the assumptions above — three eggs and roughly two cups of flour — about a dozen medium cakes, or four servings.
The Home Cook Book, first issued in the 1870s and compiled "by ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children, is generally traced as one of the earliest fundraising cookbooks in Canada, and it reads like one: hundreds of short contributions in the contributors' own words, unedited and unstandardised. Entries like this one assume a reader who already knows what a batter wants, because the woman who sent it in was writing for neighbours who cooked the same way she did. The reliance on soda rather than baking powder places the habit squarely in the era when sour milk was a daily by-product of the household and saleratus was the cheap universal riser; the instruction to beat the eggs separately is the older technique it was slowly replacing.