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New England Pancakes
Stir slowly into one pint of cream five tablespoonfuls of sifted flour. Beat up the yolks of seven new-laid eggs and the whites of four, season these with one teaspoonful of salt, and stir them into the flour, working all together thoroughly. Heat very hot in a fryingpan one tablespoonful of fresh butter; pour in a thin layer of the batter, and turn when set. Serve these piled one on another, with sugar and powdered cinnamon over each.
This is a rich, unleavened crepe batter rather than the risen breakfast pancake the name suggests. It is mostly cream and egg yolk, and it behaves accordingly.
- The hinge: keep the layer thinWith five tablespoons of flour to a pint of cream, the batter has almost no structure and sets by egg coagulation alone. Pour only enough to coat the pan, and turn as soon as the surface loses its gloss and the edges lift; a thick pour will stay slack in the middle and tear.
- A pint of creamTwo cups. Oscar's cream would have been ordinary table cream, in the range of modern light cream or half-and-half rather than heavy whipping cream. Heavy cream makes a batter dense enough to fry greasy.
- New-laid eggsSimply very fresh eggs. Any good egg works; the phrase is a mark of a kitchen with its own supply rather than a technical requirement. Seven yolks and four whites leaves three spare whites to save for another use.
- No leavening, no sugarThere is neither baking powder nor sugar in the batter. All the sweetness comes from the cinnamon sugar at the table, so do not be tempted to sweeten the mix; sugar would make these scorch before they set.
- Pan and heat'Very hot' here means hot enough that the butter foams and just begins to colour. The recipe allows one tablespoonful of butter; in practice you will probably need to add a little for each pancake and wipe out browned solids between rounds.
- Working the flour inStir the flour into the cream first, as written, then add the eggs; adding the eggs first makes the flour harder to disperse smoothly in so loose a batter.
- Yield and servingExpect roughly eight to twelve thin pancakes from the quantity, serving four. They are served piled one on another, with sugar and cinnamon over each layer.
Despite the name, this is closer to the thin egg-and-cream pancakes of the German and Austrian Pfannkuchen tradition than to anything cooked on a New England griddle: a batter fried in butter and dusted with cinnamon sugar. Oscar Tschirky was maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf from its opening in 1893 and of the Waldorf-Astoria after the Astoria was added; his 1896 Cook Book runs to some nine hundred pages of recipes drawn from the hotel's kitchens and from the wider European repertoire its chefs worked in. Regional American names in such books do not always indicate provenance. The generosity with cream and yolks suggests hotel rather than household cooking.