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American Pancakes
Mix the yolks of four and the whites of two eggs, with two table-spoonfuls of water. Put in a pinch of salt, and add gradually six heaped table-spoonfuls of flour; beat the mixture till it is quite smooth, and then add new milk, sufficient to make a thin batter. Put a piece of butter the size of an egg into an omelet-pan. Let it melt, but not brown. Then pour in a little of the mixture-enough to thinly cover the pan. Let it stiffen, loosening it round the edges, and shaking it to prevent it sticking. Throw it up to turn the pancake or turn it over gently with a wooden spoon, and when it is nicely browned on both sides it is ready. Send to table on one dish, piled one over the other, with pounded cinnamon and sifted sugar over each: cut into quarters, and serve hot. Time, five minutes to fry. Probable cost, 10d. Enough for a good-sized dish.
Despite the name, this is a thin crêpe-style pancake rather than the risen American breakfast stack — there is no leavening at all. The batter's thinness is the whole point.
- Flour measureSix heaped tablespoons of flour is somewhere in the region of 3/4 to 1 cup / 90-130 g, though heaped spoons are inexact. Work by feel: the finished batter should coat the back of a spoon thinly and pour like single cream.
- "New milk"Fresh whole milk, straight from the dairy and unskimmed. Ordinary whole milk is the equivalent; expect to need about 1 to 1 1/4 cups to loosen the paste.
- Egg ratioFour yolks to two whites gives a rich, tender pancake that browns fast. Do not substitute three whole eggs — the extra whites make it tougher and more rubbery.
- Method mattersAdd the milk gradually to a smooth thick paste, never all at once, or you will fight lumps. Once smooth, let the batter stand 20-30 minutes so the flour hydrates and the pancakes cook without a raw, floury edge.
- The pan and the butterAn "omelet-pan" is a shallow, sloping-sided skillet, 8-9 inches across; a nonstick or well-seasoned crepe pan does the same job. Butter the size of an egg is about 2 oz / 55 g, which is for the whole batch, not one pancake — use a small knob per pancake and keep the heat at medium so it never browns.
- Timing'Five minutes to fry' is hard to square with a single thin pancake, and may cover a panful rather than the whole batch; the recipe does not say. At the right heat each side takes 45-60 seconds; a pancake this thin left longer goes leathery.
- ServingGround cinnamon and caster or icing sugar between each layer, stacked, then quartered like a cake, as the recipe directs. Serve at once; they stiffen as they cool. The quantity should yield roughly 10-12 pancakes; the recipe claims only 'enough for a good-sized dish.'
- Probable cost10d is ten pre-decimal pence, ten-twelfths of a shilling. Cassell's gives a 'probable cost' for most of its recipes.
The name is a puzzle to modern eyes, since what is described here is essentially a thin French-style crepe. The tall, soda-raised griddle cake that Americans now mean by pancake had not yet displaced the thin fried batter in British usage. The cinnamon and sifted sugar layered between the stacked pancakes is a dessert treatment of long standing in northern European cookery.