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Brabant Pancake
Butter first of all your pancakes, and you should have proper pancake saucers fit to go to table. Heat half a pint of sweetened milk and melt a quarter of a pound of salt butter with it. When well melted pour it into a basin and sprinkle in nearly three ounces of flour. Beat up the yolks of three large or four small eggs and incorporate them, then add the whites well beaten. Put a spoonful or two on each saucer and set to bake in the oven for ten minutes and when done place each saucer on a plate with a good lump of apricot jam on each. If you have no pancake saucers, put the apricot preserve on one half of each pancake and fold it up.
A baked batter closer to a loose soufflé than a griddle pancake. The whole thing lives or dies on the beaten whites, so have the dishes buttered and the oven hot before the eggs go anywhere near the flour.
- The opening line"Butter first of all your pancakes" most likely means butter the vessels the pancakes will bake in rather than the finished cakes, though the wording is ambiguous. Butter generously; the batter is thin and will stick.
- Pancake saucersSmall shallow ovenproof dishes, roughly saucer-sized. Individual gratin dishes, shallow ramekins or a well-buttered Yorkshire pudding tin all work. The recipe has each saucer set on a plate to go to table.
- Imperial measuresThis is a British book, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 cups. A quarter pound of butter is 4 oz (1 stick); three ounces of flour is a scant 2/3 cup by volume, but weigh it if you can.
- Salt butterOrdinary salted butter. With sweetened milk and jam on top, the salt is doing real work here, so do not substitute unsalted without adding a good pinch.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Ten minutes for a thin egg batter in a shallow dish suggests a hot oven; something in the region of 400-425F is a reasonable modern guess, and a slack oven will tend to set the batter flat rather than puff it.
- Temper the eggsThe milk and butter are hot when the flour goes in. Let the mixture cool to warm before adding the yolks, or they will curdle into threads, then fold the whites in last with a light hand.
- Serve at onceLike any egg-risen batter these collapse within a couple of minutes out of the oven. Have the jam warmed and the plates ready.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had come to England after the German invasion, and sold in aid of relief work; measurements and oven heats are frequently left to the reader's judgement. Brabant is the central Belgian province containing Brussels and Leuven. The technique here — a hot base of milk, butter and flour lightened with separated eggs and baked rather than griddled — puts the dish closer to a soufflé than to anything cooked in a pan.