Pancake, Indian
1 pint of milk, INGREDIENTS for dish sufficient for 3 persons.- pint of milk, 3 eggs, 1/4 lb. of sugar, 1/2 a teacupful of rice, flavouring of cinnamon, preserved ginger and cherries, butter for frying. AVERAGE COST, 10d.
Boil the rice in the milk till quite soft, then beat it to a pulp and add the eggs, well beaten, the sugar and the flavouring.
INDIAN PANCAKE.
Form into an oval flat cake, and fry on one side in butter; then put it carefully on a hot dish, and garnish with the preserved fruit.
TIME. To fry, 7 or 8 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A sweet rice-and-egg batter fried as one large flat cake rather than a stack of thin pancakes — closer to a rice fritter or a Spanish tortilla dulce than to a crêpe.
- The hinge: cook the rice down until it is truly softThe rice must be boiled in the milk until it collapses and the mixture is thick enough to hold a shape, then beaten to a paste. Undercooked grains will not bind, and the cake breaks apart the moment you try to lift it.
- Quantities in modern termsA quarter pound of sugar is about 1/2 cup; half a teacupful of rice is perhaps 1/4 to 1/3 cup (a Victorian teacup is usually reckoned at 5–6 fl oz). A short-grain pudding rice breaks down to a pulp more readily than long-grain.
- The milk measure is unclearThe ingredient line has lost the fraction before "pint", so the intended amount cannot be recovered with confidence. Note that Beeton's pint is the imperial one, 20 fl oz, not 16; add the milk gradually and judge by consistency as the rice softens.
- Cool before adding the eggsLet the rice pulp drop below hand-warm before beating in the eggs, or they will scramble in threads through the batter.
- Frying one side onlyThe recipe browns the underside only, then lifts the cake onto a hot dish; which face is uppermost is not specified. Seven or eight minutes over moderate heat in a well-buttered pan suits a cake this thick, and covering the pan for the last few minutes helps the top set through.
- FlavouringsGround cinnamon, chopped preserved (stem) ginger and glacé cherries. Preserved ginger in syrup is still sold in jars; drain and chop it, and keep a little syrup for spooning over.
- YieldThe heading gives enough for three, served hot as a sweet course.
- The nameNothing in the recipe is made of cornmeal, so this is not the 'Indian meal' (corn) of American books; why Beeton calls it Indian is not explained in the text.
Mrs Beeton's All About Cookery stands in a line of English rice pancakes and rice fritters, in which boiled rice thickened with egg stands in for a flour batter. The "Indian" label in nineteenth-century English cookery is often loosely applied and need not imply Indian origin, though the reason for it here is not stated; recipes styled Indian, including curries, appear in English cookery books from the mid-eighteenth century. The costing of 10d. per dish and the note "seasonable at any time" are standard Beeton apparatus: preserved ginger and cherries kept in the store cupboard year-round, so the cook could produce a sweet course in any month without waiting on fresh fruit.