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New England Breadcakes
Soak a pint of dry bread crumbs over night in three cups of sweet milk. In the morning sift a teaspoonful of salt, one teaspoonful of cream tartar, and half teaspoonful of soda through a heaping cup of pastry flour; or use teaspoonful of baking powder in place of the soda and cream tartar. Add two well beaten eggs and two teaspoonfuls of butter melted. Beat the batter vigorously and fry quickly.
A stale-bread pancake, thinner and more custardy than a flour griddle cake. The overnight soak is the whole point: the crumbs must break down completely or you get lumps of wet bread in the batter.
- Bread crumbsA pint means 2 cups by volume of dry crumbs from genuinely stale bread, not the fine sandy crumbs sold in canisters, which are toasted and drink up far more liquid. Tear or grate day-old white bread and let it dry out, or reduce the milk if using packaged crumbs.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or sour milk called for elsewhere in books of this period. Whole milk gives the closest result.
- Beat the soaked crumbs firstAfter the overnight soak, whisk or mash the crumb-and-milk mixture until it is more or less smooth before anything else goes in. Adding flour to a lumpy base leaves lumps in the finished cakes.
- Cream of tartar and sodaOne teaspoon cream of tartar to half a teaspoon of soda is the classic 2:1 ratio that made homemade baking powder. If substituting, one teaspoon of modern double-acting baking powder is on the light side for this much batter; 1 1/2 teaspoons is closer in leavening power.
- Pastry flourA soft, low-protein flour. A heaping cup is roughly 5 oz. All-purpose works, though the cakes will be slightly tougher; substituting a tablespoon of cornstarch for a tablespoon of the flour brings it back toward soft-wheat texture.
- Two teaspoonfuls of butterThat is genuinely a small amount, about 1/3 oz, and it is correct — the crumbs and eggs carry the richness. Melt it and let it cool a little so it does not scramble the eggs.
- "Fry quickly"A hot, lightly greased griddle; the recipe gives no temperature, and something around the usual pancake heat is implied rather than specified. This batter is looser than a flour pancake batter and will spread; keep the cakes small so they can be turned once, at the point when the surface has set and the bubbles stop breaking.
Bread-crumb griddle cakes belong to the frugal end of nineteenth-century New England cookery, where stale bread was never thrown away: it went into puddings, brown betty, stuffing, or batter like this. The recipe also catches a specific moment in leavening. Cream of tartar and soda, measured separately by the cook, were the standard chemical raising agents for much of the nineteenth century; commercial baking powder combined them with a starch buffer and eventually became common enough that a cookbook could offer it as an alternative, which is exactly what this recipe does. The double instruction — do it the old way, or use the tin — recurs across several decades of cookbooks, though it cannot pin any one of them to a particular year.