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Orange Wheaten Cakes
Prepare a flannel wheaten cake preparation. Finely chop the rind of a sound fresh orange and boil the rind in two gills water for eight minutes. drain, add rind to the preparation with a tablespoon of orange flavouring, mix well, then proceed to finish cakes exactly the same.
This is a variation entry: it assumes you already have the book's flannel wheaten cake batter in front of you and only tells you what to add. Everything hinges on getting the orange into the batter without wetting it down or overpowering it.
- Two gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of water. It is only a blanching liquid for the rind and gets drained away, not added to the batter.
- Flannel cakesA flannel cake is a thin, soft griddle cake, the name usually taken to describe its texture; period versions are often raised with yeast or with beaten egg whites folded in at the last minute rather than baking powder alone. You need the book's base recipe to make this at all.
- "Orange flavouring" is ambiguousIt could mean orange extract, orange-flower water, or a sweetened orange syrup, and a tablespoon means very different things across the three. A tablespoon of modern alcohol-based orange extract in a griddle-cake batter will taste medicinal; a teaspoon or two is the sensible reading.
- The rindTake only the coloured zest with a peeler or a fine grater and leave the white pith, which is where the bitterness sits. Eight minutes at a boil softens the zest so it disappears into the batter instead of catching on the griddle.
- Dry the rindAfter draining, press the rind in a towel before it goes in. Wet zest slackens an already thin batter, and flannel cakes depend on a batter that spreads but still sets.
- Griddle heatWork at a moderate griddle heat, around 350-375F -- a drop of water should skitter, not vanish instantly. Citrus oil, and any sugar in the base batter, will brown faster than a plain cake, so expect to pull them a shade sooner.
Flannel cakes were a fixture of American hotel and boarding-house breakfasts through the second half of the nineteenth century, distinguished from the plain buckwheat cake by a wheat-flour batter thinned almost to a pour and, in the better versions, leavened overnight with yeast; the name is often said to describe the soft, napped texture cooks were after. This entry belongs to a common pattern in large professional cookbooks of the period, where one master preparation is followed by a run of one-paragraph variations, so a kitchen could put a different cake on the card each morning without a different batter. The fruit is given a double treatment here, boiled rind for body and a flavouring extract for aroma.