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French Pan Cakes
2 cups Gold Medal flour 1 tablespoon sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk 3 eggs Mix and sift the dry ingredients, add milk slowly and the beaten eggs, beat together for five minutes and fry in hot butter; roll up and fill with any kind of fruit, sprinkle with a little powdered sugar and serve hot.
These are crêpes under an older American name, and the printed proportions need attention before you start.
- The batter is too thick as writtenTwo cups of flour to one cup of milk and three eggs gives a stiff paste, not a pourable crêpe batter. Expect to add another 1 to 1 1/2 cups of milk until it runs like thin cream and coats a spoon barely at all.
- Rest the batterThe recipe calls for five minutes' beating; a 30-minute rest in the refrigerator afterwards lets the flour hydrate fully and the crepes tear less. Stir before using, as it will settle.
- "Fry in hot butter"Means a thin film, not a shallow fry. Brush an 8-inch skillet, pour in just enough batter to coat when swirled, and cook about a minute a side until the edges lift and colour.
- Powdered sugarModern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch as an anti-caking agent; period powdered sugar may or may not have. Either behaves the same here.
- Fillings'Any kind of fruit' would have covered stewed or preserved fruit as readily as fresh -- jam, apple sauce, poached pears. Fresh berries work but release liquid, so fill just before serving.
- YieldWith the batter thinned as above, roughly 16 to 18 eight-inch crêpes, serving four to six. They hold in a low oven, stacked and covered, while you finish the batch.
"French pancakes" was a common American name for crepes in turn-of-the-century cookbooks, distinguishing them from the thick, chemically leavened griddle cakes that Americans ate for breakfast. Flour-company cookbooks of the period were published to demonstrate the range of a single sack of flour. The rolled-and-filled treatment with a dusting of sugar is a familiar presentation of the period, associated with French restaurant cooking, which American home cooks encountered secondhand through hotel menus and French-influenced cookery writing from the 1880s onward.