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Quire of Paper Pancakes
Mix with half a pint of rich milk the yolks of four eggs, well beaten. Add three tablespoonfuls fine flour, four ounces sugar, five ounces fresh butter, melted and cooled, four tablespoonfuls Madeira wine, half a nutmeg. Grease the pans once with fresh butter, and this will answer for all. The above quantity will suffice for five or six persons.--Mrs. R.
This is a crêpe batter in all but name — very thin, very rich, and sweet enough to color quickly. The name refers to the finished stack, not the pan.
- What a quire isA quire is 24 sheets of paper. The dish is meant to produce a tall pile of pancakes so thin they resemble stacked sheets, often served in that pile rather than eaten singly.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. Use whole milk or, for "rich milk," half whole milk and half cream. The batter should be the consistency of thin cream; it is essentially all egg, butter and sugar with a token amount of flour.
- Three tablespoons of flourNot a typo. "Fine flour" meant finely sifted, well-bolted flour; pastry flour is a reasonable modern stand-in. The pancakes set largely from the egg yolk rather than the starch, which is why they come out paper-thin and tender.
- Butter and sugar by weightFour ounces sugar is about half a cup; five ounces butter is ten tablespoons, or a stick and a quarter. Melt the butter and let it cool to lukewarm before it goes in, or it will scramble the yolks.
- Half a nutmegFreshly grated, half a whole nutmeg is roughly a rounded teaspoon — assertive by modern taste. A half teaspoon is closer to what most cooks want now.
- Heat is the hingeWith this much sugar and butter the pancakes scorch long before they set if the pan is hot. Keep it at medium-low, spread the batter thin by tilting, and let the surface lose its gloss and the edges firm before turning — roughly a minute a side.
- Greasing onceThe instruction is literal and it works: enough butter is suspended in the batter to keep later pancakes from sticking. Butter the pan for the first one only, and use a well-seasoned or nonstick pan of 6 to 8 inches.
- The MadeiraFour tablespoons of fortified wine both flavors and thins the batter. Sweet sherry is the nearest substitute; if the alcohol is unwanted, replace it with milk and a little lemon zest, accepting that the flavor changes.
- ServingStack the pancakes as they come off, dust each layer with sugar, and serve the pile warm in wedges. The stated five or six servings assumes a dozen or more thin pancakes from this batter.
"A quire of paper" pancakes are securely documented in eighteenth-century English cookery books, and were still being copied into American manuscript books two hundred years later he conemerge as thin and pale as writing paper and are stacked like a quire of it. The formula belongs to an older tradition of egg-rich, nearly flourless batters flavored with wine and spice, closer to a French cr"pe or a custard than to the leavened flapjack that came to dominate American breakfast tables once chemical raising agents were cheap. The Madeira is the mark of the place: Virginia households imported the wine in quantity through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and used it in cookery as freely as in the decanter. Like many entries in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), this one is signed with a contributor's initial rather than a full name, Marion Cabell Tyree having assembled the book from recipes solicited from some 250 Southern housekeepers.