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Pancake Meals
Make thin pancakes, or, better, paper-thin Hoe Cakes (see recipe), while the customers sit around the fire with their taste buds beginning to unfold. As each pancake is finished, spread it with one of the following fillers, roll up pancake like a Mexican tortilla, eat with the fingersand save dish washing. (In many countries pancakes still take the place of plates.) Pancake Fillers: 1. Juicy hash, made of any leftover meat simmered down with tomatoes and chopped onion. 2. Corned beef hash, the moist kind, containing plenty of hashed potatoes enriched with evaporated milk. Or the dry, well browned kind, well sluiced with tomato catsup, and rolled in buckwheat cakes. 3. Canned chili con carne, rolled in corn cakes. 4. Canned chili beans, with barbecue or any desired sauce. 5. Cottage cheese mashed with minced onion. 6. Fry pork sausages until nice and brown, and keep them hot. Pour off most of the fat and make brown gravy of pan remains. Flip one side of each pancake in the gravy before laying a sausage across it. As you roll it up, tuck in the ends against dribbling. 7. Grate or thinly slice store cheese. Butter the pancake first, sprinkle cheese on thickly and roll before pancake has a chance to cool, for the cheese must have more than half a chance to melt. Sprinkling butter with pepper and dry mustard, or spreading pancake with prepared mustard instead of butter gives the effect of a rarebit. 8. Thin strips of leftover barbecued meat with barbecue sauce. 9. If you want to go Mexican, buy canned tortillas, toast or fry them and, when well heated, fill with any of the fry them and, when well heated, fill with any of the above stuffings, and roll. Or buy a little can of Mexican thin it to your taste, add some tomato catsup also to your taste and heat it. Dip your hot tortillas in this sauce , fill with any tasty mixture such as cut-up lettuce with minced onions and olives, sluice more sauce over and roll.
If you haven't had enough pancakes by this time, have some more for dessert. Make them thin, butter them, more for dessert . Make them thin, butter them, and spread with whatever sweet your larder offers-jelly, jam, marmalade, stewed dried fruit-or just cover well with powdered or brown sugar, and splash with fresh or canned fruit juice, lemon being the favorite.
Of course a meal like this should not be eaten at the end of a tiring day of strenuous exercise, or you'll wonder of a tiring day of strenuous exercise, or you'll wonder what kept you awake , blame it on the guy who made the coffee too strong, or on that pesky porcupine who rattled around all night trying to get at your bacon.
This is an assembly scheme rather than a fixed formula: thin pancakes cooked to order at the fire and rolled around whatever savoury filling is at hand. The only real technique is heat management, since every filling depends on the pancake being hot when it is rolled.
- Pancake thickness is the hingeA thick, cakey pancake will crack when rolled and the filling will fall out. Thin the batter until it spreads like crepe batter and cook it on a well-greased griddle at a steady medium-high heat, so each one takes only a minute or so a side.
- Hoe cakes and corn cakesHoe cake here means a plain cornmeal batter cooked on a griddle, not the sweet cornbread sold today. Corn cakes and buckwheat cakes are simply pancakes with cornmeal or buckwheat flour standing in for part of the wheat flour; buckwheat gives a darker, stronger-flavoured wrapper that suits corned beef.
- "Store cheese"A long-established American term, in use well before this book, for the plain firm yellow cheddar sold cut from a wheel at the grocery. Any sharp cheddar works. Grate it rather than slice it if you want it molten by the time the roll reaches the plate.
- Melting the cheeseThe pancake has only its residual heat to do the work, so the cheese must go on the instant the cake leaves the griddle. Alternatively, sprinkle the cheese onto the pancake while the second side is still cooking and roll it straight off the pan.
- Canned tortillasCanned tortillas have effectively vanished. Fresh or refrigerated corn tortillas are better in every way: warm them in a dry pan or briefly in hot oil until pliable before filling.
- Evaporated milk in the hashEvaporated milk is unsweetened concentrated milk and is still sold. The recipe does not say why it is specified, though it keeps unrefrigerated in camp; whole milk or cream does the same job at home.
- Heat the fillings separatelyCanned chili, chili beans and hash all need to be hot in their own pan before they meet the pancake. A cold filling in a hot wrapper produces a limp roll and a lukewarm mouthful.
- Quantities and yieldNo amounts are given anywhere. Reckon on three to four thin pancakes per person for a main course and one or two more for the sweet ones, and about a third of a cup of filling per pancake.
- Cooking to orderThis is a stand-at-the-griddle meal. Have all fillings hot and within reach before the first cake goes on, or the cook eats last and cold.