Pancakes
It is a curious unaccountable fact that if one asks for a pancake in Paris one has to wait nearly half an hour for it, and if one asks for an omelet suddenly from an English cook one has to wait about the same time. Neither pancake nor omelet need take more than five minutes at any time.
Pancakes plain. - Beat any number of eggs in a basinsay four. Mix with it the same number of ounces of flour -or say a small spoonful for every egg. Add sugar, some grated lemon-peel and nutmeg. Stir in milk enough to make it a smooth batter. Toss a ladleful of this with butter in a small frying-pan. If the cake is very thin it need not be turned, but may be doubled up as it is with sprinkled sugar inside. It is usually made thicker, and Parfait Amour then it has to be turned. Serve it with pounded sugar and sliced lemon.
Pancakes royal. - Six eggs, five spoonfuls of flour, three ounces of butter. All the rest as before.
Pancakes ornate. - Spread with jam; apricot jam the favourite.
PARFAIT AMOUR unhappily is a liqueur which lives by its name and nothing else. We all like to taste that unknown bliss which is not to be found on earth, and we hope to find its semblance in the bottle. The liqueur is too true as a satire. Starting with the idea that love is a bittersweet, Parfait Amour is made of the bitter zest of limes, mollified with syrup, with the spirit of roses, and with spicy odours. It is in fact a kind of orange bitters spoilt. Whoever drinks of Parfait Amour says in his heart, This is a mistake. And therein lies the success of the liqueur : it has a rosy colour, it has a fine name, and it is nought. One trial is enough.
In England in the olden time, when oranges were more scarce than they are now, it was the custom for a lover to give his sweetheart on New Year's Day, as an emblem of Perfect Love, an orange stuck all over with cloves.
PARMENTIER first introduced potatoes into France, and the French, in gratitude, have affixed his name to their potato soup. One might have expected a like honour, in England at least, to the name of Sir Walter Raleigh, who brought the potato from America in 1586. He was in fact the discoverer of the potato, as Columbus was the discoverer of the New World. But as the New World has been named, not after Columbus but after his follower Amerigo, so the potato throughout Europe is connected with the name, not of Raleigh but of Parmentier. The town of Metz has raised a statue to Parmentier.
PARSLEY is the crown of cookery. It once crowned men; Partridge it now crowns their food. We wreath our fish with sprigs of parsley; it would be impossible to eat cold meat without garlands of it round the dish; and the crowning grace of many a sauce and stew comes from a shower of minute parsley shed upon it at the last. There is no plant that is so much used in this way for coronation.
Fried Parsley is indispensable for fried fish, croquettes, rissoles. It should be crisp, and is only to be well done in a wire basket dipped into the frying-kettle. If the fat be properly hot, a minute is enough, and more than enough. Let the parsley be first washed and thoroughly dried. Parsley Sauce is a name that might be given to several sauces, but is generally in England given to what in the French kitchen is known as maître d'hôtel sauce.
PARSNIPS-dressed as carrots; but they require less time.
The pancakes here are thin, unleavened, crepe-style batters — nothing like an American flapjack. The whole method rests on a ratio you can scale to any number of eggs.
- The ratioFour eggs to four ounces of flour (a scant cup), thinned with milk to a pouring batter; the recipe gives no milk quantity, only "milk enough to make it a smooth batter," so add it by eye. There is no raising agent, and none is wanted.
- "A small spoonful" is vagueDallas offers it as an alternative to the ounce-per-egg rule, though a spoonful of flour falls well short of an ounce, so the two measures do not agree. Weighing is more reliable: one ounce of flour per egg.
- Pancakes royalSix eggs, five spoonfuls of flour, three ounces of butter makes a much richer, more custardy batter. Melt the butter and let it cool slightly before beating it in, or it will scramble the eggs.
- Rest the batterThe recipe omits it, but 30 minutes' rest lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax, giving a more tender cake.
- Pan heat is the hingeA small pan over medium-high heat, barely filmed with butter, and a ladleful swirled thin. The first side takes under a minute; the second, if you turn at all, takes less. Slow cooking makes them leathery.
- "Pounded sugar"Sugar crushed fine in a mortar — use caster sugar, or icing sugar if you want it to melt on contact.
- Grated lemon-peelZest only, no white pith, and add it to the sugar rather than the batter if you want the aroma to survive the pan.
- YieldThe four-egg batter should give somewhere around eight to twelve pancakes from a 7-inch pan, depending how thin you run them; enough for three or four people. They are best eaten as they come off the heat rather than stacked and held.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) is generally attributed to the journalist E. S. Dallas, who arranged it as an alphabetical dictionary rather than a sequence of recipes — which is why a pancake batter here sits between a sour note on the liqueur Parfait Amour and a short eulogy of parsley. The pancake he describes is the English one of the period: a thin egg batter fried in butter, dressed with sugar and lemon, and essentially identical to the French crêpe he complains of waiting half an hour for in Paris. Its place in the English calendar is Shrove Tuesday, when eggs, butter and milk were used up before Lent, and the lemon-and-sugar finish Dallas gives is still the standard British dressing. The jam-filled version he calls "ornate" — apricot for preference — reflects the mid-Victorian taste for a preserve with everything sweet.