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Pikelets
I lb. (4 cups) flour 1 pint (2 cups) tepid milk 1 cake compressed yeast 3 well-beaten eggs 1 teaspoonful sugar 1/2 teaspoonful salt Put the yeast and sugar into a little basin and mix them with a wooden spoon until they are liquid; then add the milk. Sieve the flour and salt into a large basin, and stir in the milk and the beaten eggs. Beat the batter for five minutes, then put it into a warm place to rise for one and one-half hours.
Drop in large spoonfuls into buttered rings on a greased griddle, turning over, so as to cook both sides a delicate brown. Serve them at once spread with butter. If more convenient, they may be baked in a very hot oven.
Cakes Pikelets are old-fashioned English breakfast hot cakes.
A yeast-raised griddle batter, close kin to the crumpet. The recipe is sound as written; the main adjustments are the yeast, the milk temperature and the rings.
- The cake of yeastOne cake of compressed (fresh) yeast in this period was about 0.6 oz. Substitute 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. If using instant, it can go straight into the flour rather than being creamed with the sugar.
- Creaming yeast with sugarMashing fresh yeast and sugar to a liquid was a common way to disperse it evenly through the batter. With dry yeast, dissolve it in a little of the warm milk with the sugar and wait for it to foam before proceeding.
- Tepid means about 100FMilk at blood heat, 95-105F. Hotter than about 120F starts killing the yeast; cold milk will stretch the rise well past the stated hour and a half.
- The batter is meant to be looseA pound of flour to a pint of milk plus three eggs gives a thick pouring batter, not a dough. Beat it hard for the full five minutes; the beating develops the gluten that holds the gas thrown off by the yeast, which is what gives pikelets their open, holey crumb.
- RingsButtered crumpet or egg rings, roughly 3 to 3 1/2 inches across. Grease the inside walls generously or the batter will grip as it climbs. Without rings the batter spreads and the cakes come out thinner and flatter.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 350-375F. Too hot and the outside browns before the interior sets, leaving a raw middle under a domed top. The surface should set and pit with bubbles before turning; the second side needs only a minute.
- The oven alternative"Very hot" in books of this vintage is generally somewhere in the region of 450-500F. Baked rather than griddled, the cakes will set differently and you lose the pitted griddle face. The griddle is the better route.
- Yield and servingAbout 20 to 24 cakes from this quantity. They stale fast, so butter and eat them straight from the griddle; leftovers are best split and toasted.
Pikelet is a Midlands and northern English word, generally traced to the Welsh bara pyglyd, "pitchy bread" — though what exactly pyglyd was meant to describe is unsettled. In much of England the pikelet is simply a thinner, flatter crumpet, cooked in a ring on a bakestone or griddle; the distinction between the two has never been fixed, and the terms seem often to have been used almost interchangeably. What marks both out from a pancake is the yeast: the long rise generates the carbon dioxide that tunnels up through the batter and leaves the characteristic pocked top, which then drinks butter. The book's note that they are "old-fashioned English breakfast hot cakes" says something about how such things travelled — by the early twentieth century the pikelet had become a slightly antique curiosity in English-speaking kitchens abroad, and in Australia and New Zealand the name had already drifted to mean a small unyeasted drop scone, which is what it still means there.