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Currant Pancakes
Stir in one-fourth pound of washed and dried grocer s currants to every pint of any plain pancake batter. Serve with hot butter, lemons and sugar.
A one-line variation rather than a full recipe, so the useful information is mostly in what the terms meant in 1896.
- "Grocer's currants"These are dried Zante currants — small seedless raisins — not fresh red or black currants. A quarter pound is roughly ¾ cup.
- Washing and dryingDried fruit sold loose from the barrel came dusty and stemmy, so a rinse was a matter of cleanliness. A brief soaking will also plump the fruit a little, which should help keep it from scorching in the pan; spread the currants on a towel until the surface is dry before stirring them in.
- A pint of batterTwo cups, which should give roughly eight to ten pancakes of ordinary size, or about four servings. Scale the fruit proportionally rather than by eye.
- Fold, don't beatStir in late -- Add the currants at the last moment and give the batter a turn between pancakes. They settle in a standing bowl and the last cakes come out bare.
- HeatSugar-rich dried fruit browns faster than batter. Medium heat rather than the high heat you might use for plain pancakes, or the currants blacken before the centres set.
- "Hot butter, lemons and sugar"Melted butter brushed over the cakes, lemon halves or wedges to squeeze, and granulated sugar passed separately — the English service, not maple syrup.
Oscar Tschirky, maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf, wrote for a kitchen that could be assumed to have plain batters on hand and to build variations on top of them, which is why this entry runs to a single sentence: the plain pancake batter is taken as given and the currants are the whole idea. Butter, lemon and sugar is the English way of eating a pancake, traditionally associated with Shrove Tuesday, and it appears in American hotel dining rooms alongside the syrup-and-griddle habit rather than replacing it. Dried currants -- the small seedless grapes shipped from Greece, whose name derives from Corinth -- were a staple pantry fruit in the nineteenth century, cheap enough to be stirred into everything from buns to boiled puddings, and sold loose in bulk, which is why recipes of the period commonly begin by telling the cook to wash them.