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Vanilla Cakes
Prepare flannel cake preparation, add to batter a half teaspoon vanilla essence and proceed to make cakes exactly the same.
This is a one-line variation on the book's flannel cake recipe, so everything hinges on the base batter; the only new element is the flavouring.
- Flannel cakes are pancakesThe name is usually explained as a reference to the texture: a soft, napped griddle cake, generally raised with baking powder or yeast and often lightened with separately beaten egg whites. Any standard tender pancake batter will stand in if you do not have the book's base recipe to hand.
- Vanilla essenceIn this period "essence" and "extract" usually meant much the same thing, an alcoholic vanilla infusion, though strengths varied. Use pure vanilla extract, not the concentrated pastes or vanilla powders sold now, or the half teaspoon may read as too strong.
- Scale the flavouring to the batterHalf a teaspoon assumes the full quantity of the book's flannel cake batter, which is not reproduced here. For a smaller household batch, cut the vanilla back proportionally rather than keeping it whole.
- Add it to the liquid, not the flourStir the vanilla into the milk and egg yolks before the flour goes in, so it disperses without extra beating of the finished batter.
- Fold the whites lastIf the base recipe calls for beaten egg whites, they go in after the vanilla and are folded, not stirred. Cook the batter promptly; it deflates on standing.
- Griddle heatA moderately hot griddle, hot enough that a drop of water skitters rather than sits, gives the pale, even surface these cakes want.
- ServingVanilla pushes these toward the dessert end of the meal, and they take well to sugar and butter, preserves, or a fruit sauce.
The International Cook Book belongs to a genre of turn-of-the-century professional compendiums in which a chef sets down hundreds of short entries, many of them variations on a preceding recipe — hence a "recipe" that is a single sentence pointing back up the page. Flannel cakes are American, and the name is generally taken to refer to their soft nap; they appear steadily in nineteenth-century household books as a rich breakfast griddle cake often distinguished from plain buckwheat or flapjacks by beaten egg whites. Commercial vanilla extract was widely available and inexpensive by the end of the century, and a chef could turn a breakfast cake into a sweet course with half a teaspoon and no other change.