Sift 1 pint of flour. Add a salt-spoonful of salt, 1 teaspoonful of soda dissolved in a little milk, the yolks of 6 eggs and the whites beaten to a stiff froth and enough milk to make a thin batter. Then bake on a hot greased griddle until done. Serve hot.
A thin, egg-rich griddle batter in the Swedish plättar or pancake mould, written for a cook who already knew what a pancake batter should look like. The instructions are terse and one ingredient is conspicuously missing.
- The soda has nothing to work onA teaspoon of soda needs an acid to react with. Period recipes of this type assumed sour milk or buttermilk; with fresh sweet milk the soda will do little but leave a faint soapy taste. Use buttermilk, or drop the soda and rely on the beaten whites for lift.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume: a pint is 2 cups, roughly 8-9 oz depending on how it was scooped. Sift first, as directed, then measure.
- Salt-spoonfulA salt-spoon was the smallest of the table spoons, about a quarter teaspoon.
- "Enough milk to make a thin batter"With 2 cups of flour and six yolks, expect to need somewhere around 2 to 2 1/2 cups of milk. The batter should pour and spread on its own, closer to heavy cream than to American pancake batter.
- Fold the whites lastBeat the whites separately to a stiff froth and fold them in at the end, after the batter is fully mixed and thinned. Stirring them into a slack batter early collapses them and you lose the only reliable leavening here.
- Griddle heatThe recipe says a hot greased griddle: moderately hot rather than smoking, lightly greased and re-greased between batches. These cakes are thin and set fast; a minute or so a side, turning when the surface looks dry at the edges.
- Six yolks and no obvious use for six whitesEgg-rich batter -- all six yolks and the six beaten whites go into the same batter, so nothing is wasted, but the ratio makes a custardy, tender cake that tears easily. Turn with a wide thin spatula.
- Yield and servingAbout twenty thin cakes, serving four. In Sweden they are usually served hot with lingonberry or other preserve rather than syrup.
This is one of a year's worth of national dishes in a genre popular around the turn of the twentieth century, when American household books began organising recipes by country as a kind of armchair travel. The dish behind it is the Swedish pancake, pannkaka in its large form and plättar when cooked small in a dimpled iron pan, distinguished from the American pancake by being thin, heavy on eggs and barely leavened. The soda in this version looks like an Americanisation: Swedish batters traditionally contain no chemical leavening at all, and its appearance here, along with the assumption of sour milk that the text never states, is the mark of a foreign recipe passed through a nineteenth-century American kitchen. Lingonberry preserve is the customary accompaniment in Sweden.