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Rose Pancakes
Make a batter of four eggs, half a pint of milk, four ounces of flour, and a little salt. Boil a nice red beetroot, pass it through a hair or wire sieve, or pound it in a mortar, add it to the batter, and fry the mixture in the usual way. Spread the pancakes with any bright-coloured jam, and serve. Probable cost, 1s.
A thin crêpe batter tinted with cooked beetroot. The only real difficulty is that the recipe never says how much beetroot, and beet colour is fragile in a hot pan.
- The measurementsHalf a pint imperial is 10 fl oz, a little under 1¼ US cups; four ounces of flour is a scant cup. With four eggs to that amount of milk this is a rich, eggy batter closer to a French crêpe than a breakfast pancake.
- How much beetroot"A nice red beetroot" is genuinely open-ended. One medium boiled beet, about 4–5 oz, puréed and sieved, gives strong colour without making the batter too wet; more than that and you will need extra flour to keep the batter pourable.
- The hinge — keep the pan moderateBetanin, the pigment in beetroot, breaks down with prolonged heat and turns brown-orange. Fry over medium rather than high heat and pull each pancake as soon as it is set, or the rose colour goes muddy.
- Sieve or blenderThe hair sieve and mortar were there to eliminate fibre. A blender or food processor does it in seconds, but still pass the purée through a fine sieve — stray strands show up as flecks in a thin pancake.
- Rest the batterNot mentioned in the original, but 30 minutes' rest lets the flour hydrate and gives a more tender pancake. Beetroot purée thickens on standing, so check the consistency and loosen with milk before frying.
- "Fry in the usual way"A well-buttered 8-inch pan, a small ladle of batter swirled thin, about a minute a side. Beetroot sugars catch quickly, so wipe the pan between pancakes.
- The jamRaspberry or redcurrant matches the colour; the beetroot itself contributes earthiness rather than sweetness, so a sharp jam works better than a bland one.
- YieldRoughly eight to ten thin pancakes from an 8-inch pan, serving four. The "probable cost, 1s" is Cassell's standard costing note and belongs to the 1870s–90s, not to any modern price.
Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery belongs to a wave of large late-Victorian household compendia that treated cookery as a subject to be indexed alphabetically, complete with a probable cost for each dish so a mistress could check her cook's accounts. Rose pancakes sit in a small Victorian genre of naturally tinted dishes — spinach green, cochineal red, saffron yellow — made when the dining table was expected to look decorative and before coal-tar dyes had entirely taken over the job. Beetroot was the obvious domestic red: cheap, keeping well through winter, and already familiar in English kitchens as a pickle and a salad vegetable. Its use as a colouring agent is old and largely undocumented in any single source, though it became more prominent in the later nineteenth century as public alarm grew over adulterated and frankly poisonous confectioners' colours. The pigment is also a fair chemistry lesson: it is degraded chiefly by heat, along with prolonged exposure to light and oxygen, which is why the pancakes must be cooked quickly if they are to deserve the name.