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French Pancakes
4 tablespoons sugar, 4 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 cup flour, 2 eggs, 1/2 tablespoon lemon extract, and 1 cup milk. Heat Crisco and mix other ingredients gradually to them, bake in six small criscoed plates for 5 minutes. When done, put jam between every alternate one, and serve high on a dish.
A very thin batter baked in shallow tins until it puffs, then stacked with jam. The book gives no oven temperature and assumes you know what "criscoed plates" are, so those are the two things to settle before you start.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Five minutes implies a fairly hot oven; somewhere around 425-450F is a reasonable modern guess. The recipe specifies greasing the plates but not heating them first, though hot pans would help the batter set and lift at the edges.
- "Small plates"Most likely shallow tin pie or sandwich plates rather than china. Individual tart tins, a small cake pan, or a heavy skillet stand in; the batter should go in barely deeper than a coin.
- CriscoThe all-vegetable shortening the book exists to sell. It is still made but was reformulated in the mid-2000s to remove trans fats, so it behaves slightly softer than the original. Butter works and tastes better here, though it browns faster in a hot pan.
- Batter proportionsHalf a cup of flour to a cup of milk and two eggs is a crepe or Yorkshire-pudding consistency — closer to cream than to pancake batter. That is correct, not a misprint; the eggs and steam do the lifting.
- Lemon extractHalf a tablespoon is 1 1/2 teaspoons, which is a great deal of modern extract in a batter this small. A teaspoon, or the grated zest of a lemon, gives the same effect without the alcoholic edge.
- Mixing orderMelt the shortening first and beat it into the eggs and sugar, then alternate flour and milk. Let the batter stand 20-30 minutes if you can; the flour hydrates and the pancakes come out more tender.
- Assembly and yieldSix thin rounds with jam between alternate layers; "serve high on a dish" suggests a single tall stack, though the wording is ambiguous. Enough for three or four as a light supper or pudding. Cut in wedges at the table.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil, an experienced cookery writer, and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which the company introduced in 1911 — which is why shortening appears in a pancake batter where a British or French cook of the same date would have used butter. "French pancakes" in Anglo-American cookbooks of the period generally means a thin, egg-rich batter cooked fast and served with jam, rolled or stacked; recipes under that name were frequently baked in saucers or shallow plates rather than fried one at a time, as here.