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French or Jelly Pancakes
3 eggs
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon sugar
½ cup flour
½ teaspoon salt
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 another name — half a cup of flour to a cup of milk and three eggs makes a very thin pour. A few of the instructions assume a coal range and a wire toaster over open flame.
- ShorteningIn this period the word covers butter, lard or a vegetable compound. Melted butter gives the best flavour for a sweet pancake; use a tablespoon and let it cool slightly before it goes into the batter so it does not cook the yolks.
- "When eggs are high"That means expensive, not old. Before refrigerated storage, eggs were cheap in spring and dear in winter, so the book offers a two-egg version propped up with half a teaspoon of baking powder. Make it as written with three eggs unless you want a slightly puffier, less tender cake.
- The batter is thinHalf a cup of flour to a full cup of milk gives roughly crêpe consistency. Rest the yolk, milk and flour mixture 20 minutes if you have time; the flour hydrates and the cakes tear less. Fold the beaten whites in only after that rest and cook at once, as the recipe directs, since the whites deflate on standing.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 375F on an electric griddle — not so hot that the thin batter sets before it spreads. Lightly greased; a cast-iron griddle or a crêpe pan both work.
- Roll while hot"Roll white hot" is the hinge. A cooled cake cracks along the fold and the jelly will not spread. Work one cake at a time straight off the griddle, and use a loose, tart jelly — currant, quince or crabapple — thinned with a fork if it has set stiff.
- Seam side downThe instruction to lap the rolled edge against the platter is not decoration; it is the only thing holding the roll shut. No toothpicks, no tying.
- The burnt-sugar linesA wire toaster heated red in the coals was the period branding iron. A kitchen blowtorch over the dredged sugar gives the same caramel scorch and the same faint burnt-sugar flavour; a metal skewer heated on a gas burner will also do it. A broiler will not — it browns the whole surface rather than drawing lines.
- YieldAbout eight to ten cakes made "slightly larger than usual" — say 7 inches. Serves three or four as a dessert or a substantial breakfast.
Thin egg-rich pancakes rolled around jam were called French pancakes in English and American cookbooks long before crêpe entered ordinary household vocabulary, and the two names describe the same batter: more egg and milk than flour, cooked in a film rather than a round. The Butterick book appeared in 1911, produced by the pattern company as part of a broad line of domestic manuals aimed at women furnishing their own kitchens, and its griddle-cake chapter sits squarely in that tradition of dressing up a cheap breakfast for company. The red-hot wire finish is the period detail worth noticing — a coal or wood range always had something glowing in it, so decorative scorching cost nothing but a moment, and versions of it turn up on everything from these pancakes to the tops of baked puddings. The alternate two-egg version, offered against a season when eggs were dear, is a quiet reminder that egg prices swung hard before year-round refrigerated storage flattened them out.