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Pancakes with Macaroons
Put two ounces of bitter macaroons and one ounce of dried orange flowers into a mortar, and pound them very fine. Turn this into a large bowl, add one-fourth pound of finely-powdered white sugar and two ounces of dried and sifted flour, and mix all well together; then stir into them the beaten yolks of ten eggs; add a salt-spoonful of salt, and one quart of cream. Make a fryingpan hot over the fire, put a lump of butter into it, and when that is quite hot fry as much of the batter as will cover the bottom of the pan; when slightly browned on one side, turn it carefully and brown the other side. Lay it on a hot tin plate, spread over a thin layer of apricot marmalade, and on that sprinkle crushed macaroons. Roll the pancake up rather tight and proceed with the next one, which should, with some more butter, have been put in the fryingpan as soon as the first one was taken out. When all the pancakes are done, cut them about three inches long, glaze them, and serve hot; or they may be served quite plain.
This is a Viennese-style rolled pancake in Waldorf dress: a very thin, yolk-rich batter fried in butter, filled with apricot and crushed almond macaroons. The batter is the part that trips people up.
- The batter is far thinner than you expectTwo ounces of flour to a quart of cream and ten yolks is essentially a custard with a little flour in it. It will not behave like a pancake batter — work with a well-buttered pan, a very thin film, and a flexible offset spatula, and accept that the first one or two are sacrificial.
- Bitter macaroonsMacaroons made with bitter almonds or apricot kernels, not coconut macaroons and not French macarons. The closest modern equivalent is the hard Italian amaretto biscuit; sweet amaretti (Lazzaroni or similar) will do if you cannot find a bitter one.
- Dried orange flowersDried orange blossoms turn up in nineteenth-century recipes and were sold by druggists and confectioners; they are now a specialty purchase. One ounce pounded fine is a substantial amount of perfume; if you substitute orange flower water there is no reliable conversion, so add it a teaspoon at a time to the cream and taste.
- Weights and small measuresA quarter pound of sugar is four ounces: about a cup if you use modern confectioners' sugar, but nearer half a cup of granulated sugar ground fine, which is what the recipe means. Two ounces of flour is a scant half cup; a quart of cream is four cups. A salt-spoonful is usually reckoned at about a quarter teaspoon.
- "Dried and sifted flour"Flour was once dried in a slow oven to drive off damp before measuring. With modern packaged flour this step is unnecessary; sifting alone is enough to keep the thin batter lump-free.
- Which creamPeriod cream varied a good deal, but something like today's light cream or half-and-half is probably nearer the mark than heavy whipping cream; a very rich batter will brown fast and be harder to turn.
- To glazeDust the cut rolls with powdered sugar and pass them briefly under a hot broiler until the sugar just catches — the hotel equivalent was a salamander. Watch them constantly; the apricot filling scorches quickly.
- YieldThe batter should make something in the region of twenty pancakes in a 9-inch pan, which cut into roughly four to five dozen three-inch rolls — a banquet quantity. Halving or quartering is sensible for a household.
Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel who signed himself "Oscar of the Waldorf," published his Cook Book in 1896, and much of it records the continental repertoire that New York's grand hotels ran on rather than anything native to America. This dish is a hotel refinement of the Austro-Hungarian Palatschinken: thin pancakes spread with apricot jam, rolled, and eaten as a sweet — a pan-Central European form, still standard in the region. The additions of pounded amaretti and dried orange blossom, and the final glaze under the salamander, are the marks of a professional pastry section with a mortar, a stock of dried flowers, and a brigade to turn out several dozen portions at once. The instruction to keep a second pancake frying while the first is being filled is a line-cook's note, not a home cook's.