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Windmill Pancakes
These are pink pancakes prepared as follows. Boil a large red beetroot until it is very tender; then peel it, cut it into thin slices, and pound it to a pulp in a marble mortar. Add the yolks of five eggs, two table-spoonfuls of flour, four of cream, plenty of powdered loaf sugar, half a nutmeg, grated, and a wine-glassful of brandy. Rub the whole into a batter, and fry the pancakes with lard. Serve them up hot, garnished with green sweetmeats.
A sweet beetroot batter fried thin and served hot — closer to a delicate fritter than a modern breakfast pancake. The pigment is the whole point of the dish, and it is the thing most easily lost.
- Cook fast, keep the colourBetalain, the pigment in red beet, breaks down with prolonged heat and turns brownish. Fry the pancakes quickly in a hot pan and serve at once; batter left to stand or held warm on a plate will dull noticeably.
- Pounding the beetrootA marble mortar can be replaced by a food processor, but purée the boiled beet to a genuinely smooth pulp and drain off any free liquid before mixing, or the batter will be watery and streaky rather than evenly pink. A large beetroot boiled tender gives roughly 8-10 oz of flesh.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was hard refined sugar broken from a cone and crushed; "powdered" here means what we would call caster or plain granulated sugar. "Plenty" is unhelpfully vague — start at 2 tablespoons and taste the raw batter.
- A wine-glassfulIn this period a wine-glass is about 2 fl oz. That is a substantial amount of brandy against two tablespoons of flour; half of it makes a batter that still fries cleanly.
- Half a nutmegHalf a whole nutmeg grated is close to a teaspoon and will dominate five yolks. A quarter is nearer modern taste.
- The batter is looseFive yolks, two spoons of flour and four of cream produce something like a thin custard, not a pourable pancake batter. Fry small pancakes, a few spoonfuls each, and turn them once they have set at the edges — they are fragile.
- LardLard was a common frying fat and gives a clean, high-heat surface; clarified butter or a neutral oil works, though butter alone will brown before the pancake sets.
- Green sweetmeatsUsually candied angelica, though candied citron or greengage were also used, cut into strips. Candied angelica is still sold by cake-decorating suppliers; slivers of candied citron peel are the nearest common substitute.
- YieldThe quantities give about eight to ten small pancakes, enough for four as a dessert course.
Coloured or "fancy" pancakes were a standing amusement of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English confectionery, where beetroot, spinach juice and saffron were used to tint batters, creams and jellies long before commercial food dyes existed. The name is not explained in the book. The abundance of egg yolks, cream, brandy and sugar against a bare two spoonfuls of flour marks this as a dessert of the richer Victorian table, and the garnish of candied angelica places it in the confectioner's repertoire rather than the everyday kitchen.