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Orange Cakes
Cut the rind of an orange into exceedingly small square pieces and boil in two gills of water for five minutes. Drain, replace the rind in the pan, squeeze in all the orange juice and cook until nearly dry. Prepare a flannel griddle cake preparation, pour orange juice and peel into preparation, lightly mix, then proceed to prepare cakes exactly the same.
A flavouring rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have a flannel cake batter on the stove side and tells you how to fold candied orange into it. Two details decide the outcome — how the rind is cut and when the orange goes in.
- Two gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of water. It serves only as a blanching medium and is drained off before the juice goes in.
- Flannel cakesA period name for a thin, very light griddle cake, leavened either with yeast set overnight or with stiffly beaten egg whites folded into a thin milk-and-flour batter. Any modern recipe called "flannel cakes" or a light buttermilk pancake batter will stand in; the point is a soft, open crumb, not a thick stack pancake.
- Cut the rind, not the pith"Exceedingly small square pieces" means brunoise-fine, and only the coloured zest. Any white pith carried along stays bitter through the boiling and the sugarless reduction here will not mask it.
- The five-minute boilThis is a blanch to soften the peel and draw out bitterness. If the orange is thick-skinned, drain and repeat with fresh water before going on.
- Cook until nearly dryWith no sugar in the pan the juice reduces to a scant, syrupy glaze in a few minutes and will scorch quickly after that. Pull it while it still moves in the pan.
- Let it cool before it meets the batterA hot syrup will set the flour and collapse beaten whites. Cool to room temperature, then fold in with a few strokes — overmixing at this stage is what makes flannel cakes tough.
- Acid and leaveningOrange juice is acidic enough to start reacting with baking soda or powder, so cook the batter soon after mixing rather than letting it stand. A yeast-risen flannel batter should get the orange just before it goes on the griddle.
- GriddleHot enough that a drop of water skitters rather than sits; the recipe gives no temperature. Lightly greased; the fruit sugars in the peel catch faster than plain batter, so watch the first cake and adjust.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; one orange is enough to flavour a modest household batch of batter.
Flannel cakes were a fixture of American hotel and boarding-house breakfasts through the nineteenth century, the name often said to have been borrowed from the cloth to advertise softness — a batter thinned with milk and lightened with beaten whites or an overnight yeast sponge, cooked thin on the griddle. Dressing them with citrus belongs to a time when the whole fruit was expected to be used: zest candied down in its own juice, nothing thrown away but the seeds. The instruction to "prepare cakes exactly the same" is characteristic of books of this kind, which assume the reader already keeps a standard griddle batter and needs only the variation.