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Kummel Cakes
Prepare a griddle-cake preparation, and one teaspoon kummel seeds, and proceed to make the cakes in exactly the same manner.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have the book's griddle-cake batter in front of you. The only real decisions are which seed is meant and how much batter the teaspoon is flavouring.
- Kummel seeds are carawayKümmel is simply German for caraway, and in Anglo-American cookbooks of this era "kummel seed" almost always means caraway rather than cumin, despite the confusion the two names cause. Caraway is what gives the flavour associated with the liqueur of the same name and with rye bread.
- Quantity is relative to an unstated batterThe original gives no batter volume, so the teaspoon is only meaningful against the book's own griddle-cake recipe. For a standard batter of about 2 cups flour and 2 cups milk, one teaspoon of seed is mild; a rounded teaspoon to a tablespoon is closer to what most palates now read as caraway-flavoured.
- Bruise or toast the seedWhole caraway dropped into batter stays hard and reads as a texture rather than a flavour. A brief dry toast in the pan, or a light crushing with the flat of a knife or in a mortar, releases far more aroma into the finished cake.
- Add the seed lastFold the caraway in after the batter is mixed and rested. Seeds stirred through early tend to settle to the bottom of the bowl, so give the batter a gentle turn between batches to keep them distributed.
- Griddle heatThe original says nothing about heat; a medium griddle (the water-drop skitter test, or roughly 375F if your griddle is calibrated) is the usual modern setting for pancakes. Keep the pan lightly greased rather than bone dry, since seeds sitting on a dry hot surface can scorch and taste burnt.
- ServingThese are not really a syrup-and-butter pancake. Butter alone, a salty cheese, or sausage and braised cabbage all suit them, the seed doing much the same work it does in rye bread.
- YieldWhatever the base griddle-cake recipe yields; the seed adds no volume. A 2-cup-flour batter gives roughly a dozen four-inch cakes, or four servings.
Caraway has been a baking spice in central and northern Europe for centuries, carried into breads, cheeses, seed cakes and cabbage dishes, and by the nineteenth century it was strongly identified with German and Austrian kitchens — hence the German spelling of the title. The International Cook Book (Filippini, 1906) is built from very short entries like this one, where a single sentence hangs a foreign flavour on an already-given American base preparation; the method is left to the earlier griddle-cake recipe and only the distinguishing ingredient is named. The approach tells you something about how "international" cooking was presented to American households of the period: not as separate techniques to be learned, but as familiar dishes given a recognisable accent, in this case the caraway note that readers would already have known from rye bread and from kümmel liqueur.