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Raisin Cakes
Cut two ounces seeded California raisins in small pieces. Prepare a wheaten cake batte, add raisins to preparation, mix thoroughly and proceed to finish and serve cakes exactly the same.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's wheaten cake batter in front of you. Read it as an instruction to fold fruit into a griddle-cake batter and cook it as usual.
- "Wheaten cake batter"A plain wheat-flour cake batter given elsewhere in the book, most likely a griddle-cake batter rather than a baked cake. The page itself gives no ingredients or quantities, so you will need to look up the parent recipe; a standard pancake batter is the nearest modern stand-in.
- Two ounces of raisinsWeight, not volume: roughly a third of a cup, about 57 g. The page does not say how large the parent batch is, so judge for yourself whether to scale the fruit up.
- Seeded, not seedlessIn this period "seeded" meant the seeds had been taken out, by hand or by machine; the raisins were whole fruit, hence the instruction to cut them small. Modern Thompson seedless raisins never had seeds to remove; chop them only if you want smaller pieces.
- Keep the fruit suspendedToss the chopped raisins with a spoonful of the dry flour before they go in. Added to slack batter they sink to the bottom of the bowl and the last cakes get all the fruit.
- Plump them firstOptional but worth it: a few minutes in warm water or milk, then drained well. Dry raisins pull moisture from the batter and can scorch on the griddle before the cake sets.
- Griddle heatThe recipe specifies none. A drop of water should skitter rather than vanish instantly; because the fruit browns faster than plain batter, err on the cooler side.
- Serving"finish and serve exactly the same" simply refers you back to the parent wheaten cake entry; check that recipe for how it is finished and how many it makes.
Filippini's International Cook Book works in dense chains: a master preparation is given once, then a run of one-line variants hangs off it, each assuming the reader has just read the entry above. Raisin cakes are one link in such a griddle-cake sequence. The specification of California raisins is a period marker — the San Joaquin Valley had made dried grapes a cheap national staple, displacing the imported Malaga and Smyrna fruit that earlier American cookbooks had called for, and the seeding machines that made "seeded raisins" a shelf item were a recent convenience. Fruited griddle cakes themselves are much older than the book, belonging to the long tradition of stretching a plain batter with whatever sweet thing the pantry held.