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PANCAKES (another way)
Break three eggs in a basin, add a little salt, and beat them well up; put to them four ounces and a half of flour, mix together with milk till the whole is of the consistency of cream. Heat the frying-pan, and for each pancake put in a piece of butter the size of a walnut. When the butter boils, pour in the batter until the bottom of the pan is covered. Fry the pancakes on both sides to a light brown. Serve one by one, or roll them up and send three or four together.
This is a thin English pancake — closer to a crêpe than to a raised breakfast cake — and the only quantity left to judgement is the milk.
- The flour weightFour and a half ounces is about 128 g, or roughly a cup of plain flour. Weighing is worth it here, since the batter's whole character depends on the flour-to-egg ratio.
- Milk by feelNo quantity is given because the target is a texture: pouring cream, not whipped. With three eggs and 128 g flour that lands around 250-300 ml (1 to 1¼ cups), added gradually so the batter never goes lumpy.
- Rest the batterThe book does not say to, but half an hour standing lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax, which gives a more tender pancake and a batter that spreads more evenly.
- A walnut of butterRoughly a tablespoon — enough to film the pan, not to fry in. "When the butter boils" means when it is bubbling and has stopped spitting its water; browned butter will colour the pancake before it sets.
- Pan and heatA 20-25 cm heavy skillet over medium-high. Pour, tilt immediately to cover the base, and cook until the edges lift and dry, about a minute, then 20-30 seconds on the second side.
- Yield and servingEight to ten pancakes from this batter, serving three or four. The recipe names no accompaniment; sugar and lemon, rolled, was a common English finish. Served "one by one" means straight from the pan to the table, which is still the best way to eat them.
Thin egg-rich pancakes of this kind are the English descendant of a very old batter tradition, and their fixture in the calendar is Shrove Tuesday, when eggs, butter and milk had to be used up before the Lenten fast — hence Pancake Day and the pancake races traditionally associated with it. Cassell's gives several versions because the dish sat awkwardly between a nursery supper, a cheap family pudding and a light savoury vehicle: the same batter, unsweetened as here, would take jam, sugar and lemon, or be rolled around something more substantial. That the recipe specifies weighed flour but leaves the milk to the cook's eye is characteristic of nineteenth-century cookery writing, which assumed a reader who knew what cream looked like when poured and did not need it spelled out.