Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Fruit Pancakes
Fruit Pancakes
2 cups flour, 2 cups milk, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 2 eggs, nutmeg and salt to taste. Put flour into basin with salt, grated nutmeg, eggs, pour milk in by degrees, stirring smoothly; beat it well in order to let the air in, and then let it stand for 1/2 an hour. This allows starch grains in flour to swell, and so batter is lighter. When ready to fry, warm Crisco and pour in, stirring at same time. Make some Crisco hot in a small saucepan, ladle some into a frying pan, when very hot, pour back into saucepan, but do not drain it, then ladle sufficient batter in to cover the bottom of pan, shake it gently over rather a sharp fire, and, when nicely browned, toss it over and brown other side, turn on to a wire or sieve, sprinkle with sugar and ripe blackberries. Roll it up, and keep it warm while finishing remainder of batter. Dish them up on platter, each row crossways to prevent under ones from becoming sodden. Sprinkle sugar over top and serve.
Despite the name, this is a crêpe batter — thin, poured to coat the pan, browned on both sides and rolled around fruit. A few of the instructions assume a coal range and a can of shortening at your elbow.
- The half-hour rest is the hingeThe recipe explains itself here, and it is right: letting the batter stand lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax, which gives a tender, flexible pancake that will roll without cracking. Skip it and the crêpes tear.
- CriscoThe book is a Crisco promotional volume, so the shortening is named at every turn. It is hydrogenated vegetable shortening; clarified butter, a neutral oil, or ordinary butter all work in both the batter and the pan. Two tablespoons melted into the finished batter is standard crêpe practice.
- The greasing methodHeating fat in a saucepan, ladling it into the pan, then pouring most of it back leaves a thin film — the period way of doing what a brush or a paper towel does now. The point is a barely greased pan, not a fried one.
- "Rather a sharp fire"Medium-high heat. The first side takes roughly a minute, the second closer to thirty seconds. If the batter sets before it spreads, the pan is too hot; if it steams and stays pale, too cool.
- ConsistencyEqual volumes of flour and milk give a batter about the thickness of heavy cream. After resting it may thicken; thin it with a spoonful more milk before the first pancake.
- Pan size and yieldIn an 8–9 inch skillet this batter makes well over a dozen pancakes, enough for four to six. The first one is nearly always a write-off.
- BlackberriesRipe raw berries and sugar, added at the moment of rolling. Frozen berries will weep and soak the pancake; if that is all you have, warm them briefly with sugar first and drain.
- Stacking crosswaysAlternating the direction of each row keeps steam from collecting and turning the lower pancakes soggy. Holding them uncovered in a 200F oven does the same job.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which had gone on sale in 1911 as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening. That accounts for the brand appearing in a batter where an older English cookbook would simply have said butter or lard — the book's job was to show that the new fat could do everything the old ones did. The pancake itself is straightforwardly English: a thin, tossed, sugared pancake of the Shrove Tuesday kind. The explanation of why the batter is rested — that the starch grains swell and the result is lighter — was a common piece of instruction in period cookery books, part of a wider effort at the turn of the century to teach cooking as domestic science rather than as inherited habit.