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French Pancakes
Beat two ounces of butter to a cream, and beat two eggs till they are light; blend with these two ounces of fine flour, and the same weight of powdered sugar. Add milk very gradually till the mixture is as thick as cream. Bake on buttered tin plates, and beat the mixture until it is poured upon them to be put into the oven. Bake a few minutes in a quick oven. Serve piled high on a dish; a cut lemon and sifted sugar should accompany, or the pancakes may have a layer of preserve between each. Probable cost, 7d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
These are baked pancakes rather than griddle ones — a thin sweet batter poured into buttered tins and set in a hot oven, closer to a Yorkshire-pudding batter than to an American flapjack. The instruction that matters most is the one buried in the middle: keep beating the batter right up to the moment it goes into the tins, since the air you whisk in is the only leavening.
- Quick oven"Quick" is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat the thin batter should set and puff at the edges within a few minutes, as the recipe says; a moderate oven risks drying it out.
- Tin platesThese were shallow, flat-bottomed tinned rounds; the recipe gives no size. Small metal cake tins, a shallow ovenproof plate, or individual tart tins do the same job. Butter them generously.
- The milk is unmeasured"Till the mixture is as thick as cream" is the only guide, and it is a real instruction rather than a vague one — aim for a batter that coats a spoon thinly and pours in a steady ribbon. With 2 oz flour this usually lands somewhere near 1/3 to 1/2 cup of milk, but go by consistency, not volume.
- Weights, not cupsTwo ounces each of butter, flour and powdered sugar is 4 tablespoons butter, a scant 1/2 cup flour, and about 1/4 cup of sugar by volume. The equal-weight scheme is the point of the recipe; weighing keeps it in balance.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered" means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar sold today. Caster sugar is the closest match; the modern icing sugar called for as a finishing dusting is fine for the "sifted sugar" at the table.
- Creaming the butterBeating butter to a cream means bringing it to a pale, soft paste at cool room temperature. If it melts or separates the batter will fry greasy patches rather than rise.
- ServingThey collapse as they cool, so stack them straight from the oven. Lemon and sugar is the plain version; the recipe's alternative is a layer of preserve between each pancake in the pile.
- YieldAs given, three or four servings — expect something like six to eight small pancakes depending on the size of your tins.
Despite the name, "French pancakes" in English cookbooks of the later nineteenth century often meant something other than crêpes; the term attached itself to a family of light baked or pan-set egg batters thought to be more refined than the heavy English pancake, in an era when "French" on a bill of fare was shorthand for elegance. Cassell's includes it among the everyday sweet dishes a household cook could produce from five staples already in the larder, and the "probable cost, 7d." is characteristic of the book: prices were printed as a guide to household expense, and it has often been suggested that they allowed a mistress to check a cook's housekeeping accounts against the dish that appeared at table. The reliance on beaten egg alone for lift is also telling, but this style of batter belongs to the older tradition in which the whisk did all the work.