Home › The Principles of Cookery › Indian Pancake
Indian Pancake
Boil half a tea-cupful of rice in milk and beat it to a pulp, add it to three eggs well beaten, sweeten with sugar, and flavour with pounded cinnamon. Fry the whole of the mixture in butter. Do not turn the pancake, but when done on one side remove from the pan to the front of the fire to brown the upper side. Strew pounded sugar over, and divide the pancake into four parts before sending it to table. Time, seven or eight minutes to fry. Probable cost, 6d.
A rice-thickened batter pancake, closer to a set custard than to a crêpe. The one thing to get right is the finish: it is browned on top under heat rather than flipped, because the batter is too soft and heavy to turn in one piece.
- Half a tea-cupful of riceA Victorian teacup runs about 5 fl oz, so this is roughly 1/3 cup of raw rice. Short or round grain gives the pulpy texture the recipe wants; long grain stays too separate to beat down.
- Boiling in milkUse about 1 1/2 cups milk to that rice and simmer gently, stirring, until the grains collapse — 20 to 30 minutes. Let it cool to warm before the eggs go in, or they will scramble.
- Sweeten with sugarNo quantity is given. Two to three tablespoons suits three eggs and this amount of rice; more than that and the surface catches before the centre sets.
- Pounded sugar and cinnamonPounded sugar is caster or superfine sugar, which dissolves on contact with the hot surface. Ground cinnamon stands in for the pounded stick.
- "To the front of the fire"That is an open range hearth used as a top heat source. A broiler or grill set to high, with the pan 4 to 5 inches beneath it, does the same job in two or three minutes. Use an ovenproof or cast-iron pan.
- Frying the whole mixturePour it all into a well-buttered 8 to 9 inch pan over medium-low heat. Seven or eight minutes is right only at that heat; hotter and the butter browns and the base sets stiff before the middle firms.
- YieldQuartered as directed, it serves four as a light sweet course, or two at breakfast. Sixpence was a modest outlay, which is part of the point of it.
"Indian" in nineteenth-century British cookbooks is a loose label, and here it attaches to nothing more Indian than rice and cinnamon — two things the Victorian kitchen filed under the East regardless of where they were actually bought. It is worth distinguishing from the American usage, where "Indian" usually means Indian meal, that is cornmeal, and an Indian pancake is a corn cake; no cornmeal appears here. What this recipe really belongs to is the large family of rice-and-egg sweets that ran through British household cookery, rice pudding among them, prized because a small measure of rice swelled in milk into something that fed several people. Cassell's, issued in parts in the 1870s and aimed at middle-class households running on a budget, prints the probable cost beside almost every dish, and sixpence marks this as an economical way to end a meal. The instruction not to turn it, but to set the pan before the open fire to colour the top, is a reminder that a Victorian range offered radiant heat at the front, before the gas broiler became a fixture of the domestic kitchen.