Mix ½ pound of sifted flour with 2 beaten eggs, a pinch of salt, a pint of milk and ½ ounce of melted butter. Mix well to a smooth pancake batter and fry in hot lard to a delicate brown. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve hot.
This is a thin crepe-style batter, not the raised American breakfast pancake. The proportions are sound; the main adjustments are units, fat, and the resting time the original assumes you already know about.
- Half a pound of flourEight ounces of sifted all-purpose flour is roughly 1¾ to 2 cups, depending how it is measured. Weighing it is more reliable, since cup measures of flour vary considerably.
- Which pintThe book gives no clue whether this is a 20-ounce imperial pint or a 16-ounce US pint. Start with 2 cups of milk and thin the batter further only if it does not coat the back of a spoon in a translucent film.
- Half an ounce of butterOne tablespoon, melted and cooled slightly so it does not cook the eggs when stirred in.
- Rest the batterGive it at least 30 minutes, covered, at room temperature. This hydrates the flour and relaxes the gluten worked up by mixing "well to a smooth" batter, which generally gives a more tender pancake.
- Hot lard means a film, not a poolA teaspoon in a hot 8- or 9-inch skillet is plenty; too much fat gives a blistered, greasy edge rather than an even brown.
- Pan temperatureMedium-high, hot enough that a drop of batter sets on contact. Each pancake takes about a minute on the first side and 30 seconds on the second. The first one out of the pan is traditionally a loss.
- Powdered sugarIn older usage this often meant a finely ground sugar of the sort now sold as caster sugar; modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch, works too.
- YieldAbout twelve to fourteen pancakes from a 9-inch pan, serving four. Stack them on a warm plate under a cloth, or hold in a 200F oven, and roll or fold at the table with sugar and a squeeze of lemon.
Pancake batters of flour, egg and milk are common to the whole of northwestern Europe, and what makes this one "Irish" in the eyes of the compiler is little more than its place in a book that assigns a nation to each day of the year. The genuinely Irish pancake traditions are elsewhere: boxty, made with grated raw and mashed potato and cooked on a griddle, and the buttermilk pancakes that used up soured milk in a farmhouse dairy. Thin egg pancakes did have a fixed place in the Irish year, though, on Shrove Tuesday, when eggs, butter and milk had to be finished before Lent began; the custom of tossing them is often said to have carried its own household superstitions about luck and marriage in the coming year.