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Apple Pancakes
Make a simple batter as for Batter Pudding (see Introductory Recipes), adding two heaping teaspoons of baking powder for each quart of flour used. Add two cups very fine-chopped apple for each quart of flour used and cook as for ordinary griddle cakes.
The recipe assumes you already have the book's batter pudding formula in front of you and that you measure flour by the quart. Both need translating before you can scale it to a household breakfast.
- A quart of flourDry measure by volume: a quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb or 500 g of all-purpose flour. That is a large batch, enough for two dozen or more four-inch cakes; most cooks will want to work in quarters or halves.
- The batter itselfA period batter pudding is flour, eggs, milk and salt beaten smooth, thin enough to pour. For 4 cups flour, figure about 4 eggs and something close to a quart of milk, added gradually until the batter ribbons off the spoon. Pancake batter wants to be a little thicker than pudding batter, so hold back some of the milk.
- The leavening is lightTwo heaping teaspoons of baking powder per 4 cups of flour works out to about half a teaspoon per cup, well under the one to two teaspoons per cup most modern pancake recipes call for. If you want lift rather than a flatter, eggier, more crepe-like cake, go to a teaspoon per cup of flour.
- Chop, do not grate"Very fine-chopped" suggests a fine dice, a quarter inch or smaller. Grated apple sheds juice into the batter and turns the cakes gummy in the middle. Two cups of chopped apple is roughly two medium firm apples, peeled and cored.
- Choose a firm appleAnything that collapses in a pie will disappear into the batter. A dense, tart variety holds its shape through the short cook.
- Griddle heat and thicknessMedium heat, around 375F, and thinner cakes than usual. The apple dice have to soften in the same two or three minutes the batter takes to set, so a thick cake will be raw and crunchy at the center.
- Yield and servingThe full quart-of-flour batch makes 24 to 30 four-inch cakes. Butter and sugar, maple syrup, or stewed apple alongside all suit them.
Fruit stirred into griddle batter was a common way of using up apples that are past their best for the table but still sound, and books of this era print it as a matter of course rather than as a novelty. The construction here tells you something about how such cookbooks worked: the author sends you back to a master batter in the "Introductory Recipes" and then gives only the variation. Batter pudding itself, baked or boiled, was English kitchen furniture of the same family as Yorkshire pudding, and cooking much the same mixture on a griddle is a close relation of it. The section heading, "The Apple," points to the other habit of the period: a cellar full of one fruit through the winter, and a book organized to work through it.