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French Pancakes
Beat together till smooth six eggs and half a pound of flour, melt four ounces butter and add to the batter, with one ounce of sugar ounces butter and add to the batter, with one ounce of sugar and half a pint of milk, and beat until smooth. Put a table-spoon at a time into a hot frying-pan slightly greased, spreading the batter evenly over the surface of the pan by tipping it about, fry to a light brown, spread with jelly, roll it up, dust it with powdered sugar, and serve hot.- Mrs. C., Murfreesboro, Tenn.
This is a crepe batter under an older name, rich with egg and butter and thinned only with milk. The proportions work as written; the technique is where a modern cook needs the detail.
- Weights in cupsHalf a pound of flour is about 1 3/4 cups (225 g), four ounces of butter is one stick (115 g), one ounce of sugar is two tablespoons, and half a pint of milk is one cup.
- The batter is thick as writtenSix eggs, a cup of milk and half a pound of flour give a batter closer to a thick cream than to standard crepe batter. Add milk a spoonful at a time until it coats a spoon but runs freely off it, or the tipping-and-spreading step will not work.
- Rest before fryingHalf an hour off the heat lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax. Unrested batter tears when you tip the pan and gives a tougher pancake.
- Cooling the butterVery hot melted butter can scramble the egg in the batter. Let it cool to barely warm before whisking it in.
- Pan and heatA well-seasoned 8-inch skillet or a nonstick crepe pan over medium-high. The pan is hot enough when a drop of water skitters. One tablespoon is right for a small pan; a 10-inch pan wants closer to three.
- TimingUnder a minute on the first side, thirty seconds on the second. 'Fry to a light brown' is a colour cue rather than a fixed time.
- Filling and finishingWarm the jelly slightly so it spreads without dragging the pancake apart. Roll seam-side down, dust with confectioners' sugar, and hold finished ones on a plate in a 200F oven while the rest cook.
- YieldDepends entirely on how much batter goes into the pan: at the recipe's one tablespoon per pancake in a small skillet the batch runs to several dozen very thin cakes; at about three tablespoons each it makes roughly sixteen to eighteen.
"French pancakes" was one common nineteenth-century English and American name for what we now call crepes: a thin, eggy, unleavened batter cooked in a skillet rather than dropped on a griddle, and often distinguished in cookbooks from the buckwheat and soda-raised cakes. The recipe is credited to a contributor in Murfreesboro, and the dish calls for six eggs and a quarter pound of butter.