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Cinnamon Cakes (To be prepared exactly)
Cinnamon cakes are to be prepared exactly the same as flannel cakes, only adding half teaspoon ground cinnamon, mixed up in the preparation.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it sends you to the book's flannel cake batter and adds a spice. A few things need translating before it works on a modern range.
- What flannel cakes areA light American griddle cake; the name is usually explained by the soft, napped texture, though that derivation is traditional rather than documented. Period batters are thin pancake batters raised either with a little yeast or with beaten egg whites folded in at the end; either will accept the cinnamon without complaint.
- Add the spice to the flourHalf a teaspoon of ground cinnamon can streak and clump if it is dropped into liquid batter. Whisking it into the dry flour before the milk goes in is the easiest way to satisfy the instruction to have it "mixed up in the preparation."
- The quantity is faintHalf a teaspoon across a full griddle-cake batter is easy to miss with supermarket cinnamon that has sat in the cupboard. A rounded teaspoon to a teaspoon and a half gives the flavour the recipe seems to intend.
- Griddle heatThe book gives no temperature. Around 375F, or a pan where a drop of water skitters rather than sits, suits griddle cakes; watch the first one and adjust.
- If the batter is yeast-raisedSome flannel cake formulas set a sponge overnight. Half a teaspoon of cinnamon is too little to trouble the yeast, but adding it when you slacken the sponge in the morning does no harm.
Flannel cakes were a fixture of American hotel and restaurant breakfast cards through the nineteenth century, and this book records the kitchen habit of building a whole family of griddle cakes on one base batter, varying it with buckwheat, rice, cornmeal or, here, a spice. The name is generally traced to the cloth: a well-made cake was supposed to be soft and slightly fuzzy on the surface rather than tight and rubbery. That a variation this small got its own entry says something about how professional cookbooks of the period worked, functioning as a checklist for a cook running a long menu rather than as reading for the home kitchen. Cinnamon itself had by then become a long way from the costly whole bark of earlier centuries, which is why it could be treated as a casual add-on.