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French Pancakes
3 eggs (yolks) 1 cup milk ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon sugar Five Roses flour.
Mix yolks, milk, salt, sugar, and pour one-third of the mixture on½ cup Five Roses flour and stir to a smooth paste; then add the remainder of the mixture and beat well. To this add½ teaspoon of salad oil. Pour enough of the batter into a hot buttered frying-pan to cover the pan. When brown, turn and brown the other side. Spread with butter and jelly, roll up and sprinkle with powdered sugar.
A plain crêpe batter, thinner and eggier than a North American pancake. The instructions are sound; the main things left unsaid are quantities, resting and pan handling.
- How much flourThe ingredient list just says "Five Roses flour," but the method fixes it: ½ cup, worked first to a smooth paste with a third of the liquid. That gives roughly 65 g flour to 1 cup milk and 3 yolks — a thin, pourable batter, about the consistency of cream.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring-wheat flour, closer to today's bread flour in protein than to soft all-purpose. Ordinary all-purpose works fine here; if anything the crêpes will be a little more tender.
- Yolks onlyThree yolks and no whites make a rich, supple pancake that rolls without cracking. The whites are left over — hold them for a meringue or an omelette rather than adding them back, which would toughen the batter.
- The paste methodAdding only part of the liquid first and beating to a smooth paste is the reliable way to avoid lumps without a blender or sieve. Do not shortcut it by dumping everything in at once.
- Rest the batterThe book does not mention it, but 30 minutes' rest lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax, giving thinner, less rubbery pancakes. Stir before using; the flour settles.
- Salad oilPeriod shorthand for table oil, which in this era generally meant olive or cottonseed oil; a neutral oil such as sunflower or canola serves now. The half teaspoon is too little to fry in, and presumably helps keep the crêpes from sticking. (Note: "neutral, unflavoured" sits awkwardly with olive oil, and the stated purpose of the oil is an inference, not something the recipe says.)
- Pan and heatMedium-high; the butter should foam but not brown. The book only says "a hot buttered frying-pan," and gives no temperature. Pour in 3 to 4 tablespoons and swirl immediately to coat -- roughly 45 to 60 seconds on the first side, less on the second.asented added specific; the recipe says only "pour enough of the batter... to cover the pan."so the 375F figure should not be presented as the book's...attribution.",
- YieldAbout eight to ten crêpes from an 8-inch pan, enough for three or four people as a dessert. Fill and roll as they come off the heat; they stiffen as they cool.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its Five Roses brand of hard-wheat flour, and copies became fixtures in Canadian kitchens for decades. "French pancakes" was a common English-language name for crêpes before the French word was in ordinary use in North America, and the phrase usually signalled a thin egg-rich batter cooked in a skillet rather than a thick, chemically leavened griddle cake. The finish here -- buttered, spread with jelly, rolled and dusted with powdered sugar -- is a familiar sweet treatment of the period.