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Oxford Pancakes
Mix three table-spoonfuls of flour very smoothly with three well-beaten eggs, and half a pint of new milk. Add a pinch of salt, an ounce and a half of butter, a table-spoonful of sugar, and the eighth of a nutmeg, grated. Fry the pancakes as thin as possible in hot fat. Sift powdered sugar over them when they are on the dish, and send a cut lemon to table with them. These pancakes should be made an hour or two before they are wanted. Time to fry, four or five minutes. Probable cost. 6d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A very thin, egg-heavy crepe batter rather than a raised pancake — three tablespoons of flour to three eggs is a custard with a little flour in it, not the other way round. It cooks fast and tears easily, so the pan matters more than the recipe does.
- Half a pintCassell's is imperial: half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. With three eggs and only three tablespoons of flour the batter will be barely thicker than cream, which is the intent.
- New milkSimply fresh whole milk, as distinct from milk that had stood and been skimmed. Ordinary whole milk is the equivalent.
- The butterAn ounce and a half is 3 tablespoons. The recipe does not say how to incorporate it; melting it, letting it cool slightly and beating it into the batter is the practical reading, since butter added cold or in lumps tends to leave flecks.
- Resting is the point'Made an hour or two before they are wanted' is deliberate enough to be worth following. The usual modern explanation is that resting lets the starch hydrate and the gluten relax, which helps a very thin batter hold together in the pan; Cassell's gives no reason of its own.
- Frying timeFour or five minutes is more likely the figure for the batch than for a single pancake, though the book does not say which. A crepe this thin takes 45–60 seconds on the first side and 20–30 on the second, in a lightly greased 8-inch pan over medium-high heat.
- Hot fatVictorian kitchens would have used clarified butter, lard or beef dripping. Clarified butter or a neutral oil wiped on with paper gives the same result without the pan smoking.
- NutmegAn eighth of a whole nutmeg is roughly a scant ¼ teaspoon freshly grated. Pre-ground nutmeg is flatter; grate it if you can.
- YieldThree or four persons, as stated — expect six to eight thin pancakes from an 8-inch pan. Serve with sifted icing sugar and lemon wedges, which is still the standard English treatment.
Lemon and sugar on a thin fried pancake is the enduring English form of the dish, tied to Shrove Tuesday and the use-up of eggs, milk and butter before Lent. The "Oxford" label attached to a number of Victorian dishes — Oxford sausages among them — without necessarily indicating any documented origin in the city itself; the recipe's distinguishing feature is its unusually high proportion of egg to flour, which makes a pancake closer to a custard skin than to the flour-heavy everyday sort. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for late nineteenth-century middle-class households, habitually gives a "probable cost" alongside each entry: sixpence for a dish serving three or four persons says a good deal about how cheaply eggs and milk figured in the domestic budget of the day.