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Pancakes, French
Make a batter by beating up together three spoonfuls of potato-starch, five raw eggs, some powdered loaf sugar, and a little water. Add enough milk to make it of the consistency of porridge. Butter well the inside of a frying-pan, and place it over a moderate fire. When it is sufficiently hot, pour in a large spoonful of the batter, and shake the pan so as to spread it over the whole of its surface. When the pancake is done enough, throw it on a dish, and sprinkle its surface with crushed loaf sugar, or cover it with jelly.
A flourless crêpe batter thickened with potato starch, which gives a very tender, faintly translucent pancake. The measurements are loose even by Victorian standards, so treat the consistency description as the real instruction.
- SpoonfulsA nineteenth-century "spoonful" in a batter is usually taken as a tablespoon, and three tablespoons of potato starch to five eggs is a plausible ratio, but the measure is genuinely imprecise, so mix, then judge by the porridge-consistency cue rather than the number.
- Potato-starchSold today as potato starch or fécule, not potato flour, which is dried whole potato and behaves quite differently. Cornstarch will substitute at the same volume, though the result is slightly less delicate.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up as needed. Powdered loaf sugar is caster or superfine sugar; crushed loaf sugar for the finish is coarse sugar, and granulated or a light dusting of confectioners' sugar both work.
- The hinge: batter consistencyEverything depends on getting the batter to the thickness of pouring porridge, then thinning slightly if it will not run to the edges of the pan. Potato starch settles out on standing, so stir the batter again before the second and third pancakes and check the consistency.
- HeatA moderate fire here means medium, roughly the point where a drop of batter sizzles without browning instantly. A batter this lean in flour turns leathery if pushed hard.
- No flour at allWith five eggs and no gluten, these set more like a thin sweet omelette than a crêpe. They tear easily; loosen the edge with a palette knife and flip once, or slide the pancake out and fold it rather than turning it.
- JellyIn this period jelly means a clear fruit preserve such as redcurrant or apple, thinned by beating if stiff. Modern jam is a fair stand-in.
- YieldDepending on how thinly you spread each spoonful, five eggs should give somewhere around eight to twelve small pancakes, enough for about four. They are best eaten as they come off the heat.
Potato starch became available to European kitchens in quantity in the earlier nineteenth century, when it was extracted commercially and sold as fécule, and it was found useful for batters, sauces and light cakes where wheat flour would have made things heavy. Cassell's files this among the French pancakes: a crêpe made without flour, rich in egg and served simply with sugar or a spoonful of clear jelly, against the heavier English pancake of milk, flour and eggs eaten on Shrove Tuesday. The habit of specifying loaf sugar is a period marker in itself; household sugar arrived as a solid cone to be broken, crushed or pounded to the fineness a given dish needed, and recipes had to say which.