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Pancakes without Eggs
Mix 2 tablespoonfuls of flour with a small pinch of salt, 2 or 3 grates of nutmeg, and a dessertspoonful of moist sugar. Make a smooth batter, by mixing with the flour, etc., very gradually, half a pint of milk, and beat it fully ten minutes, adding a tablespoonful of melted butter. Fry the pancakes in the usual way, and serve them with maple syrup or powdered sugar sprinkled between them. Time, ten minutes to fry each pancake.
An eggless griddle batter of the plain Victorian sort — no leavening at all, so these come out as thin, lacy crêpes rather than fluffy stacks. Two instructions in the original need rethinking before you start.
- The flour quantity does not scaleThe flour quantity looks too low -- Two tablespoonfuls of flour to half a pint of milk gives liquid barely thicker than the milk itself and will struggle to hold together in the pan. Other eggless pancake batters of the period are considerably richer in flour, on the order of 4 oz (roughly a cup) to half a pint of milk; treat the figure as written with suspicion and add flour until the batter coats a spoon thinly.
- Half a pintIn a British book of this era that is 10 fl oz; an American half pint is 8 fl oz (1 cup). Either works, adjusting flour to suit.
- DessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons, sitting between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. The vessel is obsolete but the measure is exact enough.
- Moist sugarUnrefined damp sugar of the sort sold loose by grocers; light brown or demerara sugar is the closest modern equivalent.
- Frying timeThe stated ten minutes per pancake cannot be right for a batter this thin, whatever the original intended by it. In a well-heated, lightly greased pan these need 1 to 2 minutes on the first side, until the edges dry and lift, and under a minute on the second.
- Why the long beatingWith no eggs and no baking powder, the only lift comes from air worked into the batter and from steam. A blender or whisk will do the work far faster than ten minutes by hand; let the batter rest about 20 minutes afterwards so the flour hydrates and the gluten relaxes.
- Yield and servingEnough for four to six thin pancakes in a 7-8 inch pan. The original layers them with maple syrup or powdered sugar between them, which is worth doing rather than serving them singly.
Eggless pancakes turn up in nineteenth-century household compilations, and the usual explanations are practical ones: eggs were seasonal and dearer in winter, when hens slow their laying, and a batter that could be made from pantry staples alone was useful. Vigorous beating and a hot pan were expected to do some of the work eggs would otherwise have done, which may be why so much beating is called for here. The nutmeg and moist sugar suggest a sweet dish rather than a savoury one, and the instruction to layer the pancakes with syrup or sugar recalls the English habit of serving pancakes stacked, a form long associated with Shrove Tuesday.