Home › Village Receipts › German Pancake
German Pancake
For one pancake take two eggs beaten well, add milk (or milk and water) and three tablespoons of flour; mix, making batter, quite thin and fry in lard or lard and butter.
— Miss Lydia W. Bagley
A one-line receipt of the kind that assumes you have watched someone make it. The quantities that matter are the two eggs and three tablespoons of flour; everything else is judgment.
- The missing measurementNo amount of milk is given, and this is genuinely ambiguous. For two eggs and three tablespoons of flour, roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup of liquid gives the "quite thin" batter described — pourable, closer to crepe batter than to American pancake batter.
- Thin means thinThis is the hinge. A thick batter will not spread and you get a scrambled, eggy round instead of a sheet. Thin it until it coats the back of a spoon and runs freely off the edge.
- One pancake, one panThe receipt makes a single large pancake, so the batter should just cover the bottom of an 8 to 10 inch skillet when tilted. Yield is one generous serving, or two if cut and served with fruit.
- Lard and butterLard was a common frying fat in kitchens of this period and gives a clean fry; the butter would be there for flavour and browning. Butter alone will darken before the pancake sets, so the mixture is the sensible reading -- about a tablespoon in a hot pan.
- Heat and timingMedium heat, one to two minutes on the first side until the edges lift and the surface looks dry, then flip for under a minute. Long cooking toughens an egg-heavy batter of this kind.
- ServingThe receipt gives no finish; sugar and lemon, or preserves, rolled or folded, would suit it. Many comparable batters include a pinch of salt, though this one does not call for it.
German pancakes appear in American community cookbooks under a variety of spellings, generally taking their name from the German Pfannkuchen loour-floour skillet pancake closer to a French crepe than to the buttermilk stacks of an American breakfast. The oven-baked, puffed version now sold as a "German pancake" or Dutch baby appears to be a later American development; the fried skillet form here is likely the older household one.