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English Pancakes
Mrs. Joseph Robinson.
Make a batter of two tea cups of flour, four eggs, and one quart of milk. Add, as a great improvement, one tablespoonful of brandy with a little nutmeg scraped in Make the size of frying pan. Sprinkle a little granulated sugar over the pancake, roll it up, and send to the table hot.
This is a crêpe batter rather than a raised American pancake, and the proportions look wrong until you accept that thinness is the point.
- The teacupA nineteenth-century teacup is usually reckoned at about three-quarters of a cup, though the books are inconsistent and some mean a full cup. Either way, two teacups of flour to a quart of milk and four eggs gives a very thin batter, thinner than most modern crêpe batters; if it pours like water, hold back some of the milk.
- Thin is intentionalThere is no leavening here at all. The pancake sets from the eggs and the heat of the pan, so the batter must be poured thin enough to swirl over the whole base and cook through in under a minute a side.
- Rest the batterHalf an hour standing lets the flour hydrate and the bubbles subside, which stops the first few pancakes tearing.
- "Make the size of frying pan"That means one ladle swirled to the edges of an 8- to 10-inch pan, not a stack of small rounds. A well-seasoned iron or a nonstick crêpe pan over medium-high heat, wiped with butter between pancakes, works for this.
- Brandy and nutmegThe alcohol cooks off and leaves the aroma; a tablespoon in a quart of batter is a background note, not a flavour. Scrape the nutmeg from a whole one — pre-ground loses most of what the instruction is after.
- Sugar and rollingGranulated sugar sprinkled on the hot pancake and rolled immediately is what the recipe directs, and matches traditional English service. Lemon is a common accompaniment, though this recipe does not call for it.
- YieldA quart of milk makes a large quantity of batter — expect twenty or more pancakes from a 10-inch pan, enough for six or eight. They must go to the table hot, so keep finished ones covered and warm rather than stacking them on the counter.
English pancakes are the Shrove Tuesday dish — flour, eggs, milk and fat used up before the Lenten fast, cooked thin and eaten rolled with sugar and lemon. The form is often said to have changed little since the sixteenth century, and it travelled to North America with English settlers, where it sat alongside the thicker, chemically leavened griddle cakes that came to dominate the breakfast table. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by named local women — Mrs. Joseph Robinson here — and its title for the dish, an "English pancake," suggests the name already carried a particular sense in Canadian kitchens. The brandy is a genteel touch of the period, when a spoonful of spirits and a scrape of nutmeg marked a dish as company fare rather than everyday cooking.