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Apple Pancakes
Make a good stiff batter with four table-spoonfuls of flour, a little sugar, three eggs, half a pint of milk, a little powdered cinnamon, and a pinch of salt. Chop six moderate-sized apples very small, mix them with the batter, and fry the pancakes in the usual way. They will require great care in turning. Time to fry, ten minutes. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for a moderate-sized dish. Serve one for each person.
A thick apple batter fried in a pan — closer to a German Apfelpfannkuchen than to a thin English pancake. The proportions are workable, but the batter is far heavier than the word "pancake" now suggests.
- The batter is drier than it looksThe batter is looser than the recipe claims -- Four tablespoons of flour to three eggs and half a pint of milk (a full 10 fl oz in the imperial pint of the period, so about 1¼ cups) is a loose custard, not a stiff batter. If you want the "good stiff batter" the recipe asks for, expect to add flour by eye until it will hold chopped apple in suspension — roughly a cup, though the original genuinely does not give enough to reproduce the intended consistency.
- Chop, do not grateGrated apple weeps and turns the batter slack. Small dice of a firm apple — Granny Smith or similar — hold their shape and keep the pancake from collapsing when turned.
- Six apples to that much batterSix medium apples is a very high ratio of fruit to batter, which is exactly why the recipe warns about turning. Fry these small, no wider than about four inches, and use two spatulas or a plate to flip.
- "Fry in the usual way"Butter or clarified butter in a heavy pan over medium heat. Too hot and the outside browns before the raw apple softens; too cool and the batter soaks fat.
- Ten minutes is for the pan, not the pancakeTen minutes -- The recipe gives "Time to fry, ten minutes" without saying whether that is for each pancake or the batch. Read as one thick fruit-laden pancake it is about right at moderate heat — four to five minutes a side. A thin one at that timing would be leather.
- Sugar and cinnamon"A little sugar" here can be read as a tablespoon or two, enough to help browning rather than to sweeten; "a little powdered cinnamon" as about half a teaspoon. The recipe gives no serving instruction beyond one pancake per person.
- YieldOne pancake per person is all the recipe specifies; "sufficient for a moderate-sized dish" gives no number, and the quantities will stretch further or less far depending on how generously you portion the batter.
Apple pancakes belong to a broad northern European family of batter puddings and fried fruit batters — the French beignet aux pommes, the German Apfelpfannkuchen, the English apple fritter — all of which turn cheap autumn fruit into a hot dish with a few eggs and a spoonful of flour. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, which appeared in the 1870s, prices nearly every entry, and the "probable cost, 1s." here is part of the book's method, alongside the "sufficient for" note.