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Pancakes
1 pint flour, 6 eggs, 1 saltspoonful salt, 1 teaspoonful baking-powder, and milk to make a thin batter. Add the baking-powder to the flour, beat the whites and yolks of eggs separately; add the yolks, salt, 2 cupfuls milk, then the whites and the flour alternately with milk, until the batter is of right consistency. Run 1 teaspoonful lard over the bottom of a hot frying-pan, pour in a large ladleful of batter, and fry quickly. Roll pancake up like a sheet of paper, lay upon a hot dish, put in more lard, and fry another pancake. Keep hot over boiling water. Send 1/2 dozen to table at a time. Serve with sauce, jelly, or preserves.
Despite the leavening, this is a thin rolled pancake much closer to a crepe than to a stack of American flapjacks. The batter should pour and spread, not mound.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume: 1 pint is 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz of all-purpose flour. A saltspoonful is 1/4 teaspoon.
- Milk quantityThe recipe starts you at 2 cups and then tells you to keep adding. Expect 2 1/2 to 3 cups total; the finished batter should coat a spoon thinly and run freely off it, closer to heavy cream than to buttermilk.
- The baking powder does littleSix separated eggs with the whites beaten in do most of the lifting here. A teaspoon of baking powder to a pint of flour is about half the usual modern rate, and in a batter this loose it probably contributes little.
- Fold, do not beatThe whites go in alternately with the flour and milk, which risks knocking them flat. Fold with a spatula rather than a whisk, and cook the batter promptly rather than letting it stand.
- Fat in the panA teaspoon of lard per pancake is generous for a modern nonstick or well-seasoned pan; a thin film of butter or neutral oil, wiped out between pancakes, gives a better edge. Butter browns fast at the heat this needs, so wipe the pan clean each time.
- Fry quicklyMedium-high heat, about 1 minute on the first side until the surface sets and the edges lift, then 30 seconds on the second. Slow cooking makes these leathery rather than tender.
- Holding them hotKeeping them over boiling water, as directed, will steam a rolled pancake soft. A plate in a 200F oven, loosely covered, holds them better.
- YieldPerhaps 16 to 20 pancakes from a 9 or 10-inch pan. The recipe's half dozen 'to table at a time' describes a batch sent out, not a portion per person, so it does not fix the number served.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks often distinguished griddle cakes, thick and eaten off the griddle in a stack, from thin "pancakes" of the older English and Continental type: an egg batter fried one at a time, rolled, and served with jelly or preserves -- though the two terms were not used consistently from book to book. The instruction to roll it "like a sheet of paper" and send half a dozen at once suggests a dessert or supper dish as much as a breakfast. The heavy proportion of eggs to flour is what makes the roll possible; the teaspoon of baking powder may be a later addition to an older formula, chemical leaveners having become cheap and widely available in American kitchens from the 1860s onward.