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Indian Cakes
Make a flannel rice cake preparation, mixing while beating the batter half teaspoon curry powder, and proceed the same way.
This is a one-line variation, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have a flannel rice cake batter in front of you. Everything hinges on knowing what that base is.
- What a flannel cake isA flannel cake is a thin, very light griddle cake, named for its soft texture rather than any ingredient. The lift comes from stiffly beaten egg whites folded in at the end, sometimes with yeast in older versions; the rice variety works cold cooked rice into a thin flour batter, in proportions that vary from book to book.
- A workable base batterFor a standard flannel rice cake batter, figure roughly 1 cup cooked rice, 1 1/2 cups flour, 2 cups milk, 2 egg yolks, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, then 2 beaten whites folded in. The original gives no quantities, so the half teaspoon of curry powder has to be judged against whatever batter you make.
- When to add the curryThe instruction to mix it in while beating matters. Curry powder is a dry blend of ground spices and will streak or clump if dropped into a finished batter, so whisk it into the flour or into the liquid batter before the whites go in.
- Curry powder has changedCommercial tinned curry powder of the period was generally milder and more turmeric-forward than what is sold now. Modern blends are stronger and more varied; taste yours and start with a scant half teaspoon if it is assertive, particularly a hot Madras style.
- Griddle heatMedium. The original gives no heat at all; on a modern griddle, hot enough that a drop of water skitters, not so hot that the surface smokes. A scorched spiced cake tastes bitter rather than spiced.
- Handle them gentlyA batter carrying cooked rice and beaten whites is fragile. Spread each cake thin, turn once, and do not press it down with the spatula, which is what collapses the flannel texture the name promises.
- Yield and servingYield depends entirely on the batter you build, since the original specifies none. The curry makes them savoury in character, so cold meat, chutney or a curried sauce suits them better than syrup, though the recipe itself says only to proceed as for plain flannel rice cakes.
"Indian" here means Anglo-Indian: the curry powder that came back to British and American kitchens with returning colonial households, sold in tins and stirred into soups, croquettes, eggs and, as here, griddle batter. Curried anything was fashionable in the late nineteenth century as a mark of a well-travelled table, and cookbooks of the period were often said to produce an "Indian" version of a plain dish by little more than the addition of the tinned blend. The base is squarely American: flannel cakes were a standard breakfast griddle cake, and adding cold cooked rice to batter was thrift, a way to use the previous day's pot. That is how such books worked: a familiar recipe, one imported spice, and a national name attached to the result.