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English Pancakes
1 pint milk, 2 eggs, 1 tablespoonful sugar, 1 cupful flour, 1 teaspoonful baking-powder, 1 cupful cream, pinch salt. Sift flour, salt, and powder together; add to it eggs beaten with sugar and diluted with milk and cream; mix into thin batter. Have small, round frying-pan; melt little butter in it; pour about 1/2 cupful batter in it, turn pan round, that batter may cover the pan, put on hot fire; turn it and brown other side. Butter each and roll it up; sprinkle with powdered sugar.
This is a crepe batter under an English name: a pint of milk and a cup of cream to a single cup of flour gives something closer to thin cream than to pancake batter. Everything depends on getting it thin enough to swirl and thin enough to roll.
- The hinge: batter consistencyThe batter should coat a spoon barely, running off in a sheet rather than dropping in blobs. If the first pancake comes out thick and cakey, thin the remaining batter with a few tablespoons of milk rather than trying to spread it harder in the pan.
- MeasuresA pint here is 2 cups (16 fl oz). With 1 cup cream that is 3 cups of liquid to 1 cup of flour, three times the flour by volume.
- The baking powderA teaspoon of leavening in a crepe batter is a period habit and does very little in a pancake this thin; it will give a faint lift and a slightly open edge. It can be left out with no loss.
- Rest the batterNot in the original, but 30 minutes at room temperature lets the flour hydrate and the bubbles settle, which makes the pancakes less rubbery and easier to turn. Strain out any lumps before cooking.
- "Small, round frying-pan"A 7- to 8-inch skillet with low, sloping sides. Half a cup of batter is generous for that size; 3 to 4 tablespoons, swirled immediately, is closer to right.
- "Hot fire"Medium-high on a modern burner. The pan is ready when a drop of batter sets at once without browning instantly; too hot and the batter seizes before it can spread. Butter the pan lightly for each one and wipe out any that browns.
- TimingAbout a minute on the first side, until the surface is dry and the edges lift, then 20 to 30 seconds on the second. These are done in far less time than a griddle cake.
- Yield and servingTwelve to fourteen pancakes from an 8-inch pan. Buttered, rolled and dusted with powdered sugar is the traditional finish; a squeeze of lemon over the sugar before rolling is the usual English addition.