Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Pancakes with Apricot Jam
Pancakes with Apricot Jam
Put one-half pound of flour into a basin with a tablespoonful of fine sugar and a little salt, break in five eggs, and mix all well together. Add one-fourth pound of melted butter, and one and one-fourth pints of milk. Cut a piece of bread round one-fourth inch thick and four and one-half inches in diameter, sift sugar over, and glaze in the oven. Three fryingpans should be used when a large number of cakes are made, so that they may be done more quickly. Stand the pans on the fire with a small piece of butter in each, and, when it is melted, put two tablespoonfuls of batter in each. When one side of the pancake is browned, turn it on the glazed piece of bread, coat the top with apricot jam, put another one over this, and so on, till all are done. Do not coat the top one with jam, but sprinkle with powdered sugar, glaze it under a salamander, and serve.
This is a stacked crêpe cake rather than a plate of breakfast pancakes: thin batter, three pans going at once, and a glazed bread round doing duty as the base. Read it as a dessert assembly and the odd steps make sense.
- The batter is a crêpe batterHalf a pound of flour is about 1¾ cups (225 g), with 2½ cups of milk (1¼ US pints), five eggs and a quarter pound of melted butter — one stick, 115 g. That much liquid to that much flour gives a pourable batter that spreads thin, not a risen pancake.
- Rest itThe original says nothing about standing time, but 30 minutes in the refrigerator lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax, which is the difference between crêpes that tear and crêpes you can flip onto a stack.
- Two tablespoons per panThat is a deliberately small measure, and it should thin out to cover the base of a small pan in a sheet; the cakes are turned onto a bread round only 4½ inches across, so keep the pans about that size. The pans want to be over moderate heat, not high, or the first side scorches before it sets.
- Only one side is cooked before stackingThe instruction to turn the pancake onto the bread as soon as one side is browned appears to mean the pale side lands upward and the cakes are not fried through on both sides. The batter is thin enough to set on the pan in any case; if you would rather they were cooked through, that is a departure from the text.
- The glazed bread roundA ¼-inch slice cut to 4½ inches across, dusted with sugar and put in the oven until the sugar caramelises; the recipe gives no temperature. It is a structural plinth that keeps the base crêpe from going soggy under the weight of jam, and it is edible.
- Salamander means broilerA salamander was an iron plate heated red and held over food to glaze the top. Use the broiler element at full heat with the stack close beneath it, watching continuously; the sugar goes from caramel to burnt in under a minute.
- Apricot jam, warmed and loosenedWarm the jam and thin it with a spoon of water so it spreads in a thin film; a heavy layer will slide the stack apart when you cut it.
- YieldThe batter makes a large number of thin cakes; the recipe's own mention of 'a large number of cakes' and three pans suggests more than one stack. Cut with a serrated knife and serve warm.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published his enormous Cook Book in 1896. A stack of thin pancakes layered with apricot jam and glazed on top is essentially the Austro-Hungarian Palatschinken treatment, apricot, Marille, being the jam of choice in Vienna and Budapest — reassembled as a cake that could be portioned in the dining room.