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Apple Pancakes
Prepare a French pancake batter. Peel and core two medium apples cut in quarters, then finely slice them. Heat half ounce good butter in a frying pan, add apples with half teaspoon vanilla essence and one tablespoon powdered sugar, toss them well and place in batter, mix well, and proceed to make and serve the cakes.
A crêpe recipe that assumes you already have the batter from elsewhere in the book. The instructions are compressed to the point of shorthand, so the working detail is worth spelling out.
- "French pancake batter" means crêpe batterThin and pourable, not the risen American breakfast pancake. A workable ratio is 1 cup flour, 2 eggs, about 1 1/4 cups milk, a pinch of salt and a spoon of melted butter, rested 30 minutes. Rested batter fries more tender.
- Powdered sugarIn cookbooks of this period the term generally means finely ground granulated sugar, what is now sold as caster or superfine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar on modern shelves. Either dissolves into the apples here, but caster is the closer match.
- Half ounce of butterOne tablespoon. Enough to glaze two apples in a small pan, not enough to fry them; keep the heat moderate so the sugar softens the fruit rather than scorching.
- Vanilla essenceVanilla extract. Half a teaspoon against two apples is assertive by modern taste but correct for the era's fondness for perfumed fruit.
- Slice thin, and mean itThe apple goes into the batter, so thick pieces will keep the cake from setting evenly and will tear it when turned. The butter-and-sugar toss softens the fruit first, but thin slices distribute better through a thin crepe. Quarter, core, then slice across into thin fans.
- Cool the apples before mixingThe recipe skips this. Hot apples dropped into egg batter will begin to set it and you get lumps of scrambled egg in the pan. Let them come down to warm.
- Cooking the cakesA well-heated pan, lightly buttered, a thin ladle of the apple-flecked batter swirled to the edges, about a minute a side over medium heat. The fruit makes the batter heavier than plain crêpe batter, so turn with a wide spatula rather than a flip.
- YieldWith a batter of the size suggested above, two apples should give somewhere around eight to ten 8-inch cakes, serving four; the recipe itself sets no quantity. Serve dusted with sugar and, if you like, a squeeze of lemon.
Filippini's International Cook Book gathers dishes from the kitchens he knew as a Delmonico's man in New York, and this one sits in the French repertoire he was trained in: crepes aux pommes, the apple folded into the batter rather than rolled inside the finished cake. That is a different thing from the German and Alsatian Apfelpfannkuchen, which lays the apple slices into the pan first and pours batter over them, producing a thick single cake rather than a stack of thin ones. Here the vanilla and sugar do the work that a sauce would otherwise be needed for. The recipe assumes the reader can produce a French pancake batter without being told, and refers back to it as the book does elsewhere.