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Coffee Pancakes
Prepare the pancakes same as French pancakes, pour a coffee sauce over and serve.
This is a cross-reference recipe: it assumes you already have the book's French pancakes and a coffee sauce to hand. The whole dish rests on those two components, so both need spelling out.
- French pancakes means crêpesIn a book of this period "French pancakes" are thin, eggy, unleavened crêpes, not raised American griddle cakes. Roughly 1 cup flour, 2 eggs, 1 1/4 cups milk, a pinch of salt and a spoonful of melted butter, thinned to the consistency of cream.
- Rest the batterHalf an hour of rest lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax, which is the difference between a lacy pancake and a rubbery one. This recipe says nothing about it either way.
- Pan heatMedium-high, with the barest film of butter, and the first pancake sacrificed to calibration. Each side takes under a minute; they are done when the edges lift and lace.
- The coffee sauceThe recipe does not say which kind. A coffee sauce could be a syrup: equal parts sugar and strong brewed coffee reduced until it coats a spoon, finished with butter. Or it could be a coffee custard, essentially a thin creme anglaise infused with coffee and cooked to about 175F, no hotter, or it curdles.
- Strong coffee, not much of itUse coffee brewed at roughly double normal strength rather than adding more liquid to the sauce. Sauce thinned with weak coffee tastes of neither coffee nor cream.
- Folding and servingFold or roll each pancake into quarters, arrange overlapping on a warm platter, then pour the sauce over just before it goes to table. Sauced pancakes go soggy within a few minutes.
- YieldThe batter quantity above gives about 12 thin pancakes, enough for four servings at three each.
Cookbooks of the early twentieth century were built on cross-reference: a single crepe formula would be listed once and then spun out into a dozen "recipes" distinguished only by the sauce or filling, which is exactly what this one-line entry does. The technique is straight from the French repertoire, where the plain crepe is a blank canvas and the interest lies in what is poured over it. Coffee was a common dessert flavouring of the period, alongside coffee ice cream, coffee eclairs and coffee bavarois.