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French Pancakes
Beat together till smooth six eggs and half a pound of flour, melt four ounces butter and add to the batter, with one ounce of sugar and half a pint of milk, and beat until smooth. Put a table-spoon at a time into a hot frying-pan slightly greased, spreading the batter evenly over the surface of the pan by tipping it about, fry to a light brown, spread with jelly, roll it up, dust it with powdered sugar, and serve hot.
This is a crêpe batter under another name, and it is unusually rich: six eggs and a full stick of butter to half a pound of flour. Weigh the flour if you can, since volume measures for nineteenth-century flour run inconsistent.
- The weightsHalf a pound of flour is about 225 g, roughly 1 3/4 cups scooped and levelled. Four ounces of butter is one US stick (115 g), and one ounce of sugar is about 2 tablespoons.
- Half a pint of milkIn an American book of 1877 this is 8 fl oz, one cup. With six eggs and a cup of milk the batter is thick for crêpes; thin it with additional milk, a spoonful at a time, until it coats the back of a spoon and pours freely.
- Let it restThe instruction the original omits. Half an hour off the heat lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax, which is the difference between a tender pancake and a rubbery one.
- Butter temperatureAdd the melted butter warm, not hot, and beat it in steadily. Poured hot into a batter with six eggs it will set them in threads.
- A tablespoon at a timeThat suits a small pan, perhaps 6 inches. In an 8- or 10-inch skillet you will need 3 to 4 tablespoons per pancake to cover the surface when you tip it about.
- Pan heatMedium-high, hot enough that a drop of batter sizzles on contact. Grease very lightly with a buttered paper between cakes; standing fat in the pan will fry rather than set the batter and spoil the even brown.
- Filling and finishWarm the jelly slightly so it spreads without tearing the pancake. Roll seam-side down, dust with powdered sugar, and hold finished rolls on a plate in a 200F oven while you cook the rest.
- YieldDepends entirely on pan size: at the recipe's tablespoon a cake this quantity of batter makes several dozen small pancakes, or roughly 18 to 24 if you use 3 to 4 tablespoons in an 8- or 10-inch pan. Enough for four to six either way.
"French pancakes" was a common nineteenth-century English and American name for what we now call crepes: a thin, eggy, unleavened batter cooked in a skillet and rolled around jam, as distinct from the thick, soda-raised griddle-cakes of the period. Buckeye Cookery was published in 1877. The high proportion of eggs and butter here belongs to a style of pancake making that owes nothing to chemical leavening.