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Apple Pancakes
Take ordinary pancake batter in which a little yeast has been mixed, and allow it to rise. Break four eggs into a large bowl, beat well and add a teaspoonful of yeast and salt and a wineglassful of brandy, with a little powdered cinnamon or grated nutmeg. In a smaller basin, mix some flour and milk in a way as to form the consistency of batter, and when it is worked smooth, stir into the large bowl with the other ingredients, Cover with a cloth and set in a warm place to work. Prepare a few apples by peeling, coring and mincing. With each quantity taken for a pancake, stir in a little of the minced apple. If too much of the apple is added the pancakes are liable to break, unless made extra thick. They should be sent hot to the table, accompanied by pounded sugar and oranges or lemons, cut in halves for squeezing over them. Pancakes, Casino Style Rub fifteen lumps of sugar on two whole orange peels; also rub five pieces of sugar on two vanilla sticks; take one wineglass of curacoa and a pony of brandy, together with half a pound of fresh butter and mix the whole together until the sugar is dissolved, and the mass forms a paste. After having your pancakes prepared as shown for plain pancake, take a chafing-dish and use for each pancake one tablespoonful of the above preparation. Place the preparation in the chafing-dish and when it is hot, put one pancake into it, and leave it there for about a minute, and turn your pancake over for the same operation as before; keep on doing the same thing for every pancake. It is proper to do this at the table as soon as the pancake is done, and serve it to your guest.
Two recipes run together here: a yeast-raised apple pancake, and the chafing-dish finish Oscar called Casino Style. Both assume a cook who already knows the house pancake batter, so the quantities are loose and want interpreting.
- The hinge: let it ferment, then work fastThis is a yeast batter, not a baking-powder one; the lift comes from a genuine rise in a warm place until the surface is domed and bubbled, though the recipe gives no time. Fold the apple into each portion just before it hits the pan, as the recipe directs; apple stirred into the whole bowl weeps juice and slackens the batter. Oscar's own warning is only that too much apple makes the pancakes liable to break unless they are made extra thick.
- Wineglass and ponyA wineglass in American kitchen writing of this period is about 2 fl oz (1/4 cup); a pony is 1 fl oz (2 tablespoons). The brandy in the batter is a flavouring, not a leavening, and some of the alcohol cooks off.
- A teaspoonful of yeastIn a book of this date this most likely means crumbled compressed fresh yeast, perhaps a third of a modern 0.6 oz cake. With instant dry yeast use about 1/2 teaspoon for a batter of this size.
- Lumps of sugarTaking a period sugar lump as roughly a modern cube, about a teaspoon, fifteen lumps is around 5 tablespoons and the five more brings it to something like a third of a cup; lump sizes varied. Rubbing the sugar against orange peel and vanilla pods pulls the oils into the sugar — a zester will do the same job.
- Pounded sugarSugar crushed fine in a mortar, i.e. superfine or caster sugar. It dissolves on contact with the hot pancake where granulated sits in gritty drifts.
- ApplesMinced means finely chopped, not grated. A firm tart variety — Granny Smith, Braeburn, a good russet — holds its shape; soft dessert apples collapse into wet pulp and drag the pancake apart.
- The chafing dishAny wide, shallow pan over a low flame does the same job. One tablespoon of the orange-vanilla butter per pancake, melted until it bubbles, then a minute a side. Add the pancakes in ones and twos: the sugar in the butter paste will scorch if it sits hot and empty.
- Alcohol at the tableCuraçao and brandy over an open flame can catch. If you are working tableside, take the pan off the heat before adding any more spirit, and keep the bottle well away from the burner.
Oscar Tschirky was never a cook by trade — he was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, and his 1896 Cook Book gathers what the hotel's kitchens and its dining room actually turned out. The yeast-raised apple pancake belongs to the German and Alsatian tradition of Apfelpfannkuchen, familiar territory for a Swiss-born steward working a New York hotel staffed largely by Continental Europeans. What makes the second half of the page distinctly of its moment is the chafing dish: in the 1890s the spirit lamp had become the fashionable centrepiece of late-supper and after-theatre dining, and the point was as much the performance as the food. A dish flamed and turned in front of the guest, in butter perfumed with orange peel and curaçao, is recognisably the same theatre that would later make crêpes Suzette famous — a lineage often traced to Monte Carlo in the same decade, though the story attached to it is more anecdote than record.