Beat the yolks of 4 eggs; add a pinch of salt, 1 tablespoonful of melted butter, 1 small cup of milk and sifted flour enough to make a smooth batter. Beat well. Add the whites of eggs, beaten stiff and let fry a golden color; then spread with jam and serve hot.
A light folded-egg pancake batter, closer to a thin souffléed crêpe than to a stack of American flapjacks. The hinge is the beaten whites: fold them in and cook at once, or the lift is gone.
- Flour quantityThe original leaves it to judgement. Start with about 1 cup of flour and stop when the batter coats a spoon and pours in a thick ribbon; it should be looser than muffin batter and thicker than crêpe batter.
- A small cup of milkThe recipe itself specifies a "small" cup, and cup measures of the period were not standardised against the modern 8 oz. Take it as roughly 6 fl oz and adjust with flour rather than trying to hit an exact figure.
- Folding, not beating"Add the whites" means fold them through in two additions with a spatula. Beating them in, after all the trouble of whipping them, collapses the only leavening the batter has.
- No raising agentThere is no baking powder or soda here. The cakes rise on egg white alone, so the batter will not hold; cook it within a few minutes of folding.
- Pan and fatA heavy skillet or griddle over medium heat, lightly buttered between batches. Too hot and the outside colours before the egg sets; "golden" is the cue, not brown.
- Size and turningLadle about 3 tablespoons per cake. They are fragile — wait until the surface is matte at the edges and bubbles hold before turning, then give the second side under a minute.
- Yield and servingThe book gives no yield; four yolks and roughly a cup of flour should make something on the order of ten small cakes. Spread with warmed jam so it spreads without tearing the cake, and serve straight from the pan.
Batter cakes of this kind sit between the pancake and the omelette, and the technique — yolks and milk beaten to a batter, whites whipped and folded in at the last moment — was one nineteenth-century way of getting height without chemical leavening. In Ireland pancakes carry a strong association with Shrove Tuesday, when eggs, butter and milk were used up before the Lenten fast, and spreading them with jam is one common domestic treatment. Its appearance here reflects the format of the day-a-dish book: a year of short recipes, each tagged with a country.