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Cerealine Cakes
Place in a basin quarter of pound cerealine flour, break in two eggs, add half ounce powdered sugar, half pint cold milk and one saltspoon salt; briskly whisk up for five minutes; add one teaspoon baking powder; gently mix for half minute. Heat in a large frying pan one tablespoon melted butter, then drop in, with a ladle, butter to make four separate cakes two and half inches in diameter each. Cook for one and a half minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish, then proceed to prepare eight more in a similar way and send to the table with maple syrup separately.
A plain drop pancake batter built on a cereal flour no longer sold under that name. The substitution and the batter's rest are the two things that decide how these turn out.
- Cerealine flourCerealine was a commercial maize preparation of the late nineteenth century, sold as flakes and as a fine flour milled from the heart of the corn kernel. The nearest modern stand-in is fine white cornmeal or corn flour (not cornstarch, and not masa); a blend of half fine cornmeal and half all-purpose flour gives a batter closer to what the original would have behaved like.
- MeasuresA quarter pound is 4 oz, roughly 3/4 cup of fine cornmeal. Half an ounce of sugar is about 1 tablespoon if read as the period's finely granulated 'powdered' sugar, but nearer 2 tablespoons of modern confectioners' sugar. Half a pint is 1 cup of milk. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon.
- "Drop in, with a ladle, butter"A printer's slip for batter. The tablespoon of melted butter goes into the pan first; the batter is ladled on top of it.
- Baking powder lastThe powder goes in after the five-minute whisking and gets only half a minute of gentle mixing. That order is deliberate: beating it in hard, or letting the batter stand, spends the lift before the cakes reach the pan. Cook them as soon as the powder is stirred through.
- Pan heatThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderate heat is what the timing implies. A minute and a half a side suits thin cakes 2 1/2 inches across; if they are browning faster than that the pan is too hot and the cornmeal centre will still be raw.
- Batter consistencyCornmeal absorbs liquid as it sits, so the second and third batches will be stiffer than the first. Loosen with a spoonful of milk as you go rather than mixing everything thinner at the start.
- YieldTwelve cakes of 2 1/2 inches, which serves three or four at breakfast. Keep the finished ones on a hot dish, uncovered, so the steam does not soften the crust.
The International Cook Book was the work of Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its recipes tend to be restaurant cookery scaled down for a household with a maid. Cerealine belongs squarely to the American corn-milling boom of the 1880s and 1890s: a proprietary maize product, generally traced to Indiana millers, sold as flakes for porridge and as a fine flour for baking, and advertised as more digestible than ordinary cornmeal. Branded cereal flours of that sort appeared in cookbooks of the period the way particular breakfast cereals do now, named outright because readers could buy the box. Serving them with maple syrup passed separately marks these as a breakfast dish in the American style rather than a French one.