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French or Jelly Pancakes
3 eggs 1 teaspoon sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup mill 1/2 cup flour 1 tablespoon shortening Separate the yolks and whites of the eggs. To the beaten yolks add the sugar, salt and one-half cup of milk. Stir in the sifted flour, the other half cup of milk, the melted shortening, then fold in the stiffly beaten whites of the eggs. When eggs are high, use only two eggs and a half teaspoon of baking-powder.
Bake on a hot griddle, making the cakes slightly larger than usual. Spread each cake with tart fruit jelly and roll white hot. Place all on a platter, side by side, with the lapped edge of the roll touching the bottom of the platter to keep the cake from spreading. Dredge with sugar and, with a red-hot wire toaster, burn lines on the sugared pancakes. This gives an attractive appearance and a slight flavor of burnt sugar.
This is a crêpe batter under an older name: half a cup of flour to a cup of milk and three eggs gives a pourable, eggy batter, not a fluffy pancake. The finishing trick with the hot wire is decorative caramelising, and it is the step most likely to be skipped or done badly.
- Batter consistencyHalf a cup of flour to a cup of milk and three eggs yields something close to heavy cream. It should pour and spread on its own; do not thicken it to normal pancake batter or the cakes will not roll.
- "When eggs are high"This means when eggs are expensive or scarce, once a seasonal matter. The substitution given \ta— two eggs plus half a teaspoon of baking powder \ta— compensates for the lost lift, and is still a sound swap.
- ShorteningIn American usage of the period this means lard or vegetable shortening; melted butter works and tastes better here. One tablespoon melted and stirred into cold-ish milk can seize, so add it last with the batter at room temperature.
- Griddle heatMedium-high, around 375F on an electric griddle, lightly greased. Thin cakes set in under a minute a side; wait for the surface to lose its wet sheen before turning.
- RollingRoll while hot, as the instruction intends. A cooled cake cracks, and warm jelly spreads thin instead of squeezing out the ends.
- The burnt-sugar linesA "red-hot wire toaster" was a wire implement for toasting bread at the fire, heated here until it glowed. A metal skewer heated over a gas burner does the same job, or dredge with sugar and pass a kitchen torch over it. A broiler will brown the whole surface rather than lining it.
- JellyTart is specified for a reason \ta— currant, quince or crabapple. Sweet jam plus the sugar dredge and caramelised sugar makes the whole plate cloying.
- YieldRoughly eight to twelve thin cakes depending on size, serving three or four as a dessert or a substantial breakfast.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks used "French pancakes" to mean a thin, egg-rich cake rolled around jelly \ta— essentially the crêpe, naturalised and given a domestic name before crêpe entered ordinary English kitchen vocabulary. The alternate title, "jelly pancakes," points to the part that mattered to the household cook: the filling could well have been homemade currant or crabapple jelly from the summer's preserving. The branding of sugar with a hot wire belongs to the era of the coal or wood range, when a piece of iron could be heated to redness at will; it is the same impulse behind the salamander iron used to glaze puddings, and it survives today as the kitchen torch. The note about using fewer eggs when eggs are high is a reminder that egg prices swung sharply with the seasons before year-round commercial laying.