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English Pancakes
1 pint milk 1 tablespoon sugar 2 eggs 1 cup Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon baking powder Pinch of salt.
Sift the flour, salt and baking powder together. Add to this the well-beaten eggs and sugar, and mix all with the pint of milk. Mix all ingredients thoroughly.
If too thick, add more milk. Put a small piece of butter in a hot frying pan, then spoonfuls of the batter. When lightly browned, turn over, then fold on hot dish.
Serve with powdered sugar and a squeeze of lemon.
A thin crêpe-style batter, closer to a French crêpe than a North American stack pancake. The ratio is the thing to notice before you start.
- The batter is meant to be very thinThe batter is meant to be thin -- one cup of flour to a pint (2 cups) of milk gives a pourable, cream-thick batter rather than a spoonable one. Note that the recipe still directs "spoonfuls of the batter" into the pan, not a tilted pan-coating film, and allows for more milk "if too thick."
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour, still sold today. Any modern all-purpose flour works; the protein is slightly higher than a soft Southern flour, which here matters very little.
- Rest the batterNothing in the original says to, but 20 to 30 minutes off the heat lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax, and the pancakes tear less when you turn them. Stir once before using, since thin batter settles.
- The baking powderA teaspoon is a period touch that gives a slightly puffed, softer pancake rather than a truly lacy crêpe. It can be left out entirely if you want the thinner, more supple result; it will not affect anything else.
- Pan and heatMedium-high, in an 8 to 10 inch skillet, with only enough butter to gloss the surface. Too much butter and the batter beads instead of spreading. Each side takes roughly a minute, the second side less.
- "Fold on hot dish"English pancakes are rolled or folded into quarters as they come out of the pan and stacked on a warmed plate, sugared and lemoned at the table. Keep the plate genuinely warm, since these go leathery as they cool.
- YieldRoughly eight to ten pancakes, serving three or four, depending on how large you make them.
The pancake with sugar and lemon is the British Shrove Tuesday pancake, eaten to use up eggs, milk and fat before the Lent fast, and the thin unstacked form has been standard in England since long before this book. Its appearance in a Canadian milling company's cookbook reflects the mixed inheritance of Canadian home cooking in the early twentieth century: British dishes carried over intact, printed next to North American ones. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its flour, compiled from recipes contributed by Canadian housewives, which is why the flour is named in the ingredient list where a modern book would simply say "flour."