Pancakes
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 or 5 persons. -6 eggs, 6 oz. f flour, 1½ pint of milk, butter or lard. AVERAGE Cost, 1s.
Ascertain that the eggs are i resh, break each one separately in a cup, whisk them well, put them into a basin, wth the flour, salt and a few drops of milk, and beat the PANCAKES, RICHER. whole to a perfectly smooth batter; then add by degrees the remainder of the milk.
The proportion of this latter ingredient must be regulated by the size of the eggs, &c. &c.; but the batter, when ready for frying, should be of the consistency of thick cream. Place a small frying-pan on the fire to get hot; let it be delicately clean, or the pancakes will stick, and, when quite hot, put into it a small piece of butter or lard, allowing about oz. to each pancake. When it is melted, pour in the batter, about 1/2 teacupful to a pan 5 inches in diameter, and fry it for about 4 minutes, or until it is nicely brown on one side. By only pouring in a small quantity of batter, and so making the pancakes thin, the necessity of turning them (an operation rather difficult to unskilful cooks) is obviated.
When the pancake is done, sprinkle over it some pounded sugar, roll it up in the pan, and take it out with a large slice, and place it on a dish before the fire. Proceed in this manner until sufficient are cooked for a dish: then send them quickly to table, and continue to send in a further quantity, as pancakes are never good unless eaten almost immediately they come from the frying-pan.
PANCAKES.
The batter may be flavoured with a little grated lemon-rind, or the pancakes may have preserve rolled in them instead of sugar. Send sifted sugar and a cut lemon to table with them. To render the pancakes very light, the yolks and whites of the eggs should be beaten separately, and the whites added the last thing to the batter before frying.
TIME. From 4 to 5 minutes for a pancake that does not require turning; from 6 to 8 minutes for a thicker one.
SEASONABLE at any time, but specially served on Shrove Tuesday.
A plain Victorian pancake batter, thinner and eggier than an American one and closer to a French crêpe. The method is sound; only the units and the pan need translating.
- Quantities6 eggs, 6 oz (about 1 1/3 cups) plain flour, 1 1/2 pints milk — that is 30 fl oz in imperial measure, roughly 3 1/2 US cups. Add the milk gradually and stop when the batter pours like thick cream; you may not need all of it.
- YieldStated as a dish for four or five people. In practice this batter gives around eighteen to twenty pancakes from a 5-inch pan, going by the half-teacupful the recipe specifies; proportionately fewer from a larger pan.
- The hingeRest the batter half an hour before frying. Beeton does not say so, but it lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax, which is the difference between a tender pancake and a leathery one.
- Fat per pancakeThe amount of butter or lard for each pancake has dropped out of the text. A scant teaspoon, swirled to coat and the excess poured off, is right for a 5-inch pan; more than that and the pancake fries rather than sets.
- Pan and heatA well-seasoned cast iron or a good non-stick skillet over medium-high. The instruction that the pan be "delicately clean" mattered when pans were scoured iron; the modern equivalent is simply a pan nothing has stuck in previously.
- TimingFour to five minutes a pancake reflects a coal range and a heavy pan. On a modern burner a thin pancake sets in 45 to 60 seconds on the first side and half that on the second. Judge by the edges lifting and the surface losing its wet sheen.
- TurningBeeton dodges the flip by keeping the batter shallow, but with a thin non-stick pan and a palette knife there is no reason not to turn them. Browning both sides gives a better texture than one raw-looking face.
- Sugar and lemon"Pounded sugar" is caster or superfine sugar. Roll each pancake with sugar inside, keep them warm in a low oven at 250F rather than "before the fire," and serve with lemon wedges.
- For a lighter pancakeThe suggestion to whisk the whites separately and fold them in last works, but the batter must be used within a few minutes or the foam collapses. Fry as you go rather than making the whole batch first.
Pancakes belong to Shrove Tuesday for a practical reason: eggs, milk and fat were forbidden during Lent, and a batter was the quickest way to empty the larder before the fast began. The English form recorded here — thin, eggy, no raising agent, dressed with sugar and lemon — appears to have been settled by some point in the nineteenth century, and Beeton's version differs from a French crêpe chiefly in using rather more egg and no resting time. Her aside that turning is "an operation rather difficult to unskilful cooks" fits the readership the book is generally understood to have addressed: mistresses of modest new households, who might be directing kitchen work as much as doing it. The note that pancakes "are never good unless eaten almost immediately" is the one piece of advice here that has not aged at all.