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Pink Pancakes
Take a moderate-sized boiled beetroot, pare off the dark outer skin, and cut the root into slices, and pound it in a mortar to a smooth pulp. Make a batter by mixing two table-spoonfuls of flour with half a pint of milk and five well-beaten eggs. Add half a tea-spoonful of grated nutmeg, and a table-spoonful of powdered sugar, and when these ingredients are well mixed beat the pulp of the beetroot into the batter. Fry the pancakes as quickly as possible, and serve them rolled, with a little bright-coloured jam inside each one. Time, four or five minutes to fry the pancakes. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
An egg-heavy batter with barely any flour, tinted by boiled beetroot. Treat these as thin, tender crêpes rather than fluffy pancakes, and cook them fast so the colour survives.
- The hinge: speed and colourBetalain, the pigment in beetroot, is destroyed by prolonged heat and turns a dull brown. Get the pan hot, cook each pancake in well under a minute a side, and serve at once.
- Half a pintImperial measure, so 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups of milk. With five eggs and only two tablespoons of flour, the batter is very loose — closer to a sweet omelette mixture than a pancake batter.
- Boiled beetroot, not pickledThe recipe assumes plain beets boiled in their skins. Vacuum-packed cooked beetroot works if it is packed in water; anything in vinegar will curdle the milk and sour the batter.
- Pounding in a mortarA food processor or the fine side of a box grater does the job in seconds. The pulp must be genuinely smooth, or lumps of beet will catch and scorch in the pan.
- SweetnessA tablespoon of powdered sugar across the whole batch is restrained by modern standards, on the assumption that jam supplies the rest. In Victorian usage 'powdered' meant sugar pounded fine from the loaf, so caster sugar is the nearer modern equivalent. Taste the beetroot first — varieties vary considerably in sugar.
- The panButter in a well-seasoned or non-stick pan, wiped between pancakes so the milk solids do not blacken. The high egg content makes the batter fragile; keep the pancakes small, around 6 inches, for easy turning.
- YieldThe recipe says three or four servings. It does not say how many pancakes; the batter runs to well over a pint, so expect a dozen or more if you keep them to 6 inches.
- Filling'Bright-coloured jam' is unspecified; raspberry or redcurrant would reinforce the pink rather than fight it. Warm it slightly so it spreads without tearing the pancake.
Cassell's belongs to the late-Victorian moment when colour on the table was a mark of skill, and cooks reached for natural dyes — spinach green, cochineal red, saffron yellow, beetroot pink. Beetroot's natural sugar made it plausible in sweet dishes as well as salads, and it turns up in that role in English cookery before Cassell's, though how common such uses were is hard to judge. The costing here, tenpence for a dish serving three or four, suits the middle-class household the dictionary was written for: showy enough for a supper table, cheap enough to be unremarkable. Note too that the pigment's instability was understood in practice if not in chemistry — the instruction to fry 'as quickly as possible' is the whole recipe in four words.