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Curry Cakes
Quarter pound sifted flour, two raw eggs, half ounce fine sugar, quarter ounce baking powder, saltspoon salt, half saltspoon nutmeg, teaspoon Indian curry powder and half pint cold milk.
Place the flour in a bowl, crack in the eggs, add the sugar, salt, nutmeg, curry, baking powder and milk, and mix with a whisk until thoroughly thickened. Lightly butter the bottom of a large frying pan with a little melted butter, and as soon as the pan is thoroughly hot pour in the preparation with a two-and-a-half-inch ladle, four cakes at a time, and fry for one and a half minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish covered with a napkin, proceed exactly the same till the batter is finished, and serve with maple syrup separately.
A thin pancake batter seasoned with curry powder and nutmeg, fried in butter and served with maple syrup. The measurements are by weight and by old spoon-sizes, so convert before you start.
- The weightsA quarter pound of flour is about 115 g, roughly a cup once sifted. Half an ounce of sugar is about 1 tablespoon; a quarter ounce of baking powder is somewhere between 1½ and 2 teaspoons, a generous but not unreasonable amount for this quantity of flour.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the salt is ¼ teaspoon and the nutmeg ⅛ teaspoon. Grate the nutmeg fresh; pre-ground has almost none of the resinous note the recipe is after.
- Half pint of milkIn an American book of this date, most likely 1 cup (8 fl oz). That gives a batter thinner than a modern thick pancake batter, though not as thin as crepe batter.
- Curry powderA teaspoon of commercial curry powder in the whole batch is a background flavour, not heat. Modern blends vary widely in salt, chilli and fenugreek, so a mild, unaggressive powder is the safer choice here. Bloom nothing — it goes straight into the raw batter.
- Pan heatMedium, not high. Butter browns fast, and at 1½ minutes a side over a hot flame these will darken before the centre sets. Wipe the pan and re-butter lightly between batches so the milk solids from the last round do not burn into the next.
- Whisk, then wait"Mix until thoroughly thickened" means whisked smooth, not aerated. Ten minutes' rest lets the flour hydrate and the lumps dissolve, and the baking powder still has plenty of lift left for the pan.
- The napkinDressing them on a folded napkin on a hot dish is a period technique for absorbing butter and keeping the cakes from steaming limp. A folded tea towel on a warmed plate does the same job.
- YieldAbout a dozen small cakes; three or four servings as a breakfast or luncheon dish, with the syrup passed separately as directed rather than poured over. The measure is a 2½-inch ladle, so the finished cakes will spread somewhat wider than that.
Alexander Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) gathered recipes from many nations, and this is a characteristic product of that approach: a griddle batter carrying "Indian curry powder" and finished, incongruously, with American maple syrup. Curry powder had been a fixture of British and then American grocery shelves since the late eighteenth century, sold as a single ready-mixed condiment rather than the changing spice combinations of actual Indian cooking, and by 1900 it functioned in Western kitchens as a flavour in its own right — dropped into soups, cream sauces, deviled eggs and, here, breakfast cakes. The pairing with sweet syrup is less strange than it looks: nutmeg and sugar are already in the batter, and the curry is doing much the same work as the spice in a spice pancake. Dishes like this one show what "the world's kitchen" meant to a New York chef of the period — not regional authenticity, but a shelf of imported seasonings to be used wherever they seemed interesting.