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Sweet Milk Griddle Cakes
1 tablespoon sugar 2 eggs 1½ cups to 2 cups milk 2 tablespoons melted fat 3 teaspoons baking powder Combine all dry materials and sift. Beat eggs, milk and melted fat together. Add sifted dry materials and beat thoroughly. Place batter in a pitcher. Pour on a hot, greased griddle.
A plain pancake batter of the type printed by the dozen in early twentieth-century booklets. The ingredient list as set in type is incomplete, so read the notes before you start.
- The flour is missingThe method says to sift "all dry materials," but the list gives only sugar and baking powder. A batter of this kind normally runs about 2 cups of flour to 1½–2 cups milk; the original quantity cannot be recovered from the page, so treat that as a reconstruction rather than the book's own figure.
- Salt tooNo salt is listed. Comparable batters commonly included ½ to 1 teaspoon; without it the cakes taste flat, especially with only a tablespoon of sugar.
- "Melted fat"In an American booklet of this kind the term covers lard, shortening, bacon drippings or melted butter, whichever the household had open. Melted butter or a neutral oil both work; let it cool slightly so it does not cook the eggs when combined.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to roughly two cups of flour is a generous but unremarkable amount of leavening. Modern double-acting powder gives a second lift on the griddle.
- "Beat thoroughly" is dated adviceCurrent practice is to stir only until the flour disappears, lumps and all. Thorough beating develops gluten and gives tough, chewy cakes.
- Griddle heatAim for about 375°F, or a surface where a drop of water skitters rather than sits. Turn once, when the surface bubbles have opened and the edges look dry — roughly 2 minutes a side.
- Milk rangeThe recipe allows 1½ to 2 cups: less gives thicker cakes, more gives thinner ones that spread. Pouring from a pitcher rather than spooning suggests a batter at the thinner end, though the book does not say so.
- YieldAbout sixteen to eighteen four-inch cakes, serving four.
Griddle cakes came in two families in American cookbooks, and the titles tell you which leavening the household was using: "sour milk" or buttermilk cakes relied on soda reacting with the acid in the milk, while "sweet milk" cakes — sweet meaning fresh and unsoured, not sugary — needed chemical baking powder to rise. Commercial baking powder became cheap and reliable in the later nineteenth century, so by the time booklets like this one were being handed out, the sweet-milk version had the advantage of not depending on having milk at the right stage of souring. The instruction to pour from a pitcher suggests a thin batter, with cakes cooked in batches for a family breakfast rather than to order.