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Pancakes, Polish
Take eight eggs, and beat them up very thoroughly with about a pint and a half of milk or cream, two ounces of oiled butter, half a grated nutmeg, and about a dozen lumps of sugar that have been rubbed on the rind of a lemon. Mix in enough flour--about three-quarters of a pound--to make a very smooth batter. Melt a little butter in a frying-pan, and when it frizzles pour in some of the batter, and sprinkle a few currants over. When the pancake is fried, shake some powdered sugar over it, roll it up like an ordinary pancake, and serve hot.
A rich, thin lemon-scented pancake batter, closer to a crêpe than a modern flapjack. The quantities are large by household standards today and scale down cleanly by half or a quarter.
- The pint and a halfCassell's is British, so the pint is 20 fl oz: about 30 fl oz, or roughly 850 ml, of milk or cream. Whole milk gives the batter its expected fluidity; all cream will fry heavy and brown fast.
- Oiled butter"Oiled" here means melted until liquid and clear, not browned. Two ounces is about 55 g, or 4 tablespoons.
- The sugar lumps and lemonRubbing loaf sugar over the rind was the standard way to extract citrus oil before microplanes. Substitute the finely grated zest of one large lemon plus a couple of tablespoons of sugar; the weight of a dozen hand-cut lumps varied and cannot be pinned down exactly.
- Flour quantityThree-quarters of a pound is 340 g, or a shade under 3 cups. Add it gradually to the liquid rather than the reverse, and beat smooth before the last of the milk goes in.
- Rest the batterThe recipe does not say so, but half an hour's rest lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax. Undrested batter of this richness fries tough and tears when rolled.
- Currants on the wet sideScatter them the moment the batter hits the pan, while the surface is still liquid, so they set into the pancake. Dropped onto a set surface they fall off in the roll.
- Heat and fatMedium-high, with only a film of butter wiped over the pan between pancakes. Too much butter in the pan and the batter slides rather than spreading thin.
- YieldThe full quantity makes roughly 20 to 24 thin pancakes in a 9-inch pan, enough for eight to ten people. Hold them stacked under a cloth in a low oven and roll them just before serving, as they crack once cool.
Cassell's collected pancakes under national labels, and "Polish" here signals the enriched, egg-heavy, lemon-and-currant style associated with Central and Eastern European pancakes rather than any single documented Polish dish; the naming convention in Victorian dictionaries of cookery was loose and often reflected what an English kitchen believed foreign cooking to be. Rolling rather than folding was the older English habit. The lump-sugar-on-lemon-rind trick was once standard in good kitchens and is the clearest date-stamp on the page.