No. 3079

Pancakes with Preserves—Light

Pannequets Legers aux Confitures

Dilute half a pound of flour with eight egg-yolks, one pint of milk, a gill of cream, and four ounces of melted clarified butter; add lemon or vanilla flavoring, a grain of salt, three grated bitter almonds, and the beaten egg-whites. Dip a brush in clarified butter, and grease over some small pancake pans; heat and pour into each one a spoonful of the preparation; spread it thinly over the entire surface of the pan, and as soon as the paste assumes a color underneath turn over on the other side. When done slip on a baking sheet, besprinkle with vanilla or lemon sugar, and dress on a dish, one on top of the other; serve with a separate plateful of preserves.

← No. 3078 Pancakes with Orange Flower Water—Large Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3080 Peaches a la Colbert →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a thin French crêpe batter under an older name, but the ingredient list includes bitter almonds, which is why the recipe cannot be reproduced as printed.

Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed, grated or wetted — exactly what this recipe calls for. Unprocessed bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for eating in the United States and are restricted in many other countries; there is no household way to verify how much amygdalin a given batch carries.
The batter is not heated enough to matterHydrogen cyanide is volatile and prolonged heating drives some of it off, but a crêpe cooks in under a minute per side and most of the batter sits raw in a bowl at room temperature while the pan is worked through. The recipe itself lists bitter almonds alongside lemon or vanilla flavouring, as though they were an ordinary aromatic; that assumption no longer holds.
Do not substitute in placeIf you want this dish, use a current crêpe recipe rather than adapting this one. We are not offering a rewritten version here.
Reading the old measuresFor reference only: a gill is half a cup, and "clarified butter" means butter melted and the milk solids skimmed and the water left behind, which is why it can be brushed on a hot pan without burning.
"Small pancake pans"The recipe assumes more than one small pan: the cook brushes several with clarified butter and works through them, which is how a batch this size becomes practical. No size is given.
Lemon or vanilla sugarSugar scented in the kitchen, granulated sugar stored with split vanilla pods or with dried zest until it took the scent. Neither is a branded product in this book.

A Little History

Pannequet is generally traced to the French domestication of the English "pancake," and its appearance in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) shows how thoroughly Delmonico's kitchen absorbed foreign words into a French service vocabulary: the batter is a crêpe, the name is said to be borrowed back from English, and the dish is filed among the hot entremets served between the roast and the dessert proper. The léger in the title marks it out from the neighbouring entries — eight yolks and separately beaten whites make a batter that sets almost immediately in a buttered pan. Bitter almonds appear throughout nineteenth-century pastry work as a cheap, intense source of the flavour we now buy as almond extract.