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Bread-Crumb Cakes
Prepare a wheatcake preparation. Put in a saucepan half ounce butter with three tablespoons fresh bread crumbs, place on fire and toss until crumbs are a nice brown colour. Thoroughly drain on a cloth, then add to the wheat-cake preparation, lightly mix and proceed to finish cakes the same way.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have the book's wheatcake batter mixed and a griddle heating. The whole point is the browned crumbs, so treat them as the main event.
- The hinge: brown the crumbs properlyThe crumbs must be tossed in the butter until genuinely nut-brown and dry, not merely warmed. Pale crumbs soften back into the batter and add nothing but weight; browned ones stay crisp and give the cakes their flavour.
- "Half ounce butter"One tablespoon. Use a small skillet rather than a wide saucepan so three tablespoons of crumbs sit in a single layer and colour evenly, and keep them moving — they go from brown to burnt in seconds.
- "Fresh bread crumbs"Soft crumbs torn or grated from a day-old white loaf, not dried packaged crumbs and certainly not seasoned ones. Fresh crumbs absorb the butter and crisp; commercial dry crumbs turn gritty.
- "Drain on a cloth"Paper towel does the job. This step matters more than it looks — buttery crumbs stirred straight into batter make the cakes greasy and heavy.
- Fold, do not beat"Lightly mix" means a few turns with a spatula, added at the last moment before cooking. Crumbs left sitting in wet batter go soggy within minutes, so cook the cakes promptly.
- Griddle heatModerate; a drop of water should skitter. The recipe gives no temperature, but because the crumbs are already browned, a very hot griddle will scorch them before the interior sets.
- Wheatcake preparationThe base is the book's own wheatcake batter, given elsewhere; this entry only tells you what to add to it. Any standard milk or buttermilk pancake batter will carry three tablespoons of crumbs, though the yield depends entirely on the batter you start from.
Adding browned crumbs to a batter is a thrift habit that hardened into a technique. Buttered crumbs — Semmelbrösel in Austrian and German kitchens, polonaise crumbs in French service — were the standard way to use up a stale loaf and were scattered over vegetables, noodles and dumplings. This entry is one of a run of short wheatcake variations, each altering a single element of the same base batter, which is how professional cookbooks often handled families of dishes: write the mother preparation once, then list the departures in a few lines apiece. The result here is a slightly nutty, coarser-textured cake, and it reflects a period when a cook was expected to read three sentences and supply the rest from training.