Wheat Cakes
One pint sour milk, teaspoonful of soda, a little salt, two eggs, flour to make a thin batter.
A bare-bones griddle batter of the kind cooks were expected to finish by eye. The proportions are sound; only the sour milk and the vague "flour to make a thin batter" need translating.
- Sour milkThis means naturally clabbered raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Pasteurised milk left out simply spoils. Cultured buttermilk is the direct substitute, or a pint of milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- Soda needs the acidThe teaspoon of soda is there to be neutralised by the sour milk. Use sweet milk and you get a soapy, faintly yellow cake with a metallic edge. The saleratus called for in books of this period is a close relative of modern baking soda — potassium bicarbonate in earlier usage, sodium bicarbonate later — and can be treated as baking soda here.
- A pintTwo cups. The batter will take roughly two cups of flour, and possibly less, to reach pouring consistency; add it gradually — the recipe asks for a thin batter, one that ribbons off the spoon and spreads on its own, not one you have to push.
- Mix late, cook soonThe soda begins working the moment it meets the sour milk. Combine wet and dry only when the griddle is hot, stir just until the flour disappears, and cook straight away. Lumps are preferable to a beaten, deflated batter.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 375F on an electric griddle — a drop of water should skitter rather than sit or vanish instantly. Turn once, when the surface bubbles have opened and stay open.
- "Wheat cakes" means pancakesThe name distinguishes them from the buckwheat and cornmeal cakes that shared the breakfast table. Nothing about the method is unusual for a modern pancake.
- YieldAbout twelve to fourteen four-inch cakes, enough for three or four people.
Recipes this terse are common in American bread and breakfast chapters of the period, where the technique was assumed and the ingredients were whatever the kitchen had to hand. In households that took milk raw and daily, sour milk was typically a by-product rather than a purchase: milk that had clabbered on its own, which the soda turned from a nuisance into leavening. The pairing is older than reliable chemical baking powders and persisted alongside them. The distinction between wheat cakes, buckwheat cakes and corn cakes mattered more then than now — buckwheat batters were often raised overnight with yeast, while a wheat cake like this one was the quick option, mixed and griddled in short order.