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Pancakes, New England
Mix a pint of cream, five table-spoonfuls of fine flour, seven yolks and four whites of eggs, and a very little salt. Make the pancakes very thin, and fry them in fresh butter, and between each sprinkle sugar and cinnamon. Serve very hot.
This is a crêpe batter, not an American-style pancake: no leavening, a very high proportion of egg and cream, and the instruction to make them "very thin". The stack is assembled as it cooks, each layer dusted with cinnamon sugar.
- The pintCassell's is a British book, so the pint is the imperial 20 fl oz, about 2 1/2 US cups. Using a 16 oz US pint gives a noticeably thicker batter, which works but needs a little milk to loosen it.
- Cream, not milkNineteenth-century "cream" was unstandardised and varied a good deal, but in a batter like this it is generally taken to be nearer modern single or light cream than double. Heavy cream at 36 percent makes the pancakes heavy and prone to catching; light cream, or half cream and half whole milk, is likely nearer the mark.
- Fine flour"Fine flour" means finely milled white flour, as opposed to household or seconds flour. Plain all-purpose flour is the equivalent. Five tablespoons is around 1 1/2 oz, so this is an extremely eggy batter, closer to a custard than a dough.
- The odd egg countSeven yolks to four whites is an unusual split. The yolks give richness and colour, and the likely reason for holding back three whites is that they would toughen so thin a pancake. Use the leftover whites elsewhere rather than adding them in.
- Rest the batterThe recipe does not say to, but half an hour's rest lets the flour hydrate and the bubbles subside, which is the difference between a lacy pancake and a rubbery one. Strain the batter if the eggs have left threads.
- The pan and the butterFresh butter means unsalted and sweet, as against the salted keeping butter of the period. Butter browns fast in a thin pan; wipe out the solids between pancakes or the later ones taste scorched.
- TimingAt this thickness each side takes well under a minute over medium heat. Anything approaching the several minutes a thick batter needs will dry them out completely.
- Yield and servingExpect twelve to sixteen pancakes from the imperial pint, serving four to six. Sprinkling sugar and cinnamon between each pancake builds a stack; keep it in a low oven, loosely covered, while you finish frying.
The name is a puzzle in a British book, and it is worth reading it as a period label rather than a provenance: Victorian cookery dictionaries routinely attached place names to variants, and "New England" here need not signal any documented American origin. The batter itself belongs to a much older European family of rich, unleavened egg-and-cream pancakes, the kind that in England were fried thin and stacked with sugar and spice long before chemical raising agents arrived, and which survive as the Shrove Tuesday pancake. Cinnamon and sugar as a pairing had been the standard sweet-spice finish for English pancakes and fritters since at least the seventeenth century. The high yolk count also reflects a period reality: eggs in a household with poultry were plentiful and cheap in spring, and separating them to use yolks freely while saving whites for meringues, icings and clarifying is likely to have been a matter of thrift rather than extravagance.