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IRISH PANCAKES (another way)
Mix a pint of cream with half a dozen fresh eggs, beaten and strained. Add a glass of sherry, two or three ounces of butter, melted, some pounded cinnamon, and nutmeg, grated, a quarter of a pound of white sugar, and flour sufficient to make an ordinary batter. Rub butter over a clean pan, and, when the batter is quite smooth, drop in the quantity to make a thin pancake. Powder the pancakes well with sugar, and serve them piled one on the other, or fold them with a layer of apricot marmalade between. A cut lemon is the usual accompaniment. Time, about five minutes.
A rich, sweet crêpe batter — cream rather than milk, a quarter pound of sugar, and enough butter that the pan barely needs greasing. The sugar is what governs the cooking, so read that point first.
- Sugar means moderate heatWith 4 oz of sugar in the batter these scorch long before the centre sets. Keep the pan at a steady medium; a hot pan will give you a dark, bitter skin over raw batter.
- A pintCassell's is British, so this is an imperial pint — 20 fl oz, or 2½ US cups of cream. Single cream or half-and-half is closer to the intent than double cream.
- A glass of sherryIn Victorian usage a wine glass is roughly 2 fl oz, occasionally up to 4. Two ounces is enough to read as sherry without slackening the batter.
- Flour "sufficient"No quantity is given and none can be reliably inferred. For this volume of liquid, start around 8 oz of plain flour and judge by consistency: it should coat a spoon and run off freely, like thin cream.
- ButterTwo or three ounces melted, cooled slightly before it goes in so it does not cook the eggs. Because the batter is already buttered, the pan needs only the thinnest wipe.
- The five minutesMost likely the figure for a single pancake rather than the batch, though the recipe does not say; either way it is generous. On a properly heated pan each one takes about a minute on the first side and less on the second.
- Apricot marmaladeIn this period marmalade meant any thick fruit preserve, not necessarily citrus. Apricot jam is the direct equivalent.
- Yield and servingExpect twelve to sixteen thin pancakes from this quantity — six to eight servings. The cut lemon is squeezed over the sugared pancakes at the table.
Cassell's gives two Irish pancake recipes, and both are far removed from the everyday griddle pancake: cream instead of milk, wine, spices and a heavy dusting of sugar mark this as a dessert dish from the richer end of nineteenth-century cookery rather than anything of peasant origin. Pancakes carried a strong seasonal association with Shrove Tuesday across Ireland and Britain, the day for using up eggs, butter and cream before Lent, and enriched versions like this one belong to that tradition of deliberate indulgence. The nutmeg, cinnamon and sherry are a survival of a much older English and Anglo-Irish taste for spicing sweet batters — a pattern visible in printed cookery from the seventeenth century onward — while the lemon served alongside is described in the recipe itself as the usual accompaniment.