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French Pancakes, Au Curacao
Prepare a French pancake batter, adding two table-spoons curacao to the preparation, and proceed to make the cakes exactly the same way.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have the book's French pancake entry in front of you. What it amounts to is a thin crêpe batter perfumed with orange liqueur.
- The base batter"French pancakes" here means crêpes, not the American breakfast pancake. A standard batter is about 1 cup flour, 2 eggs, 1¼ cups milk, a pinch of salt and a tablespoon of melted butter, whisked smooth; the two tablespoons of curaçao go in with the liquid.
- Rest the batterThirty minutes to an hour of resting lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax, which is the difference between a tender crêpe and a rubbery one. The alcohol also disperses more evenly.
- CuraçaoAn orange liqueur, dry or sweet depending on the bottling, and generally around 30-40% alcohol. Cointreau, triple sec or Grand Marnier all stand in; if you use a sweeter one, cut any sugar in the base batter slightly.
- Pan and heatA 7-8 inch steel or nonstick pan over medium-high, lightly buttered, with just enough batter to coat when you swirl. About a minute on the first side, thirty seconds on the second.
- Alcohol and browningMuch of the alcohol will cook off in the pan, though not all of it. Two tablespoons of liqueur adds only a little sugar to a whole batch, so any extra browning should be slight -- but watch the first one and drop the heat if it darkens before it sets.
- Yield and servingThe quantities above give roughly twelve to fourteen crêpes. The recipe itself says nothing about service; folded or rolled and dusted with powdered sugar would be the usual treatment for a sweet crêpe of this kind, and a further splash of curaçao before serving is a plausible finish rather than something the book directs.
Curaçao takes its name from the Dutch Caribbean island where the bitter laraha orange, a descendant of Spanish sweet orange stock gone feral in dry soil, yields a peel too harsh to eat but fragrant when dried and distilled with spirit. By the late nineteenth century it was a fixture on hotel and restaurant back bars in Europe and America, and it turns up constantly in the dessert sections of professional cookbooks of the period, splashed over fruit, folded into ices and, as here, worked into batters. Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906) grew out of decades at Delmonico's in New York, and its structure shows it: a master preparation is given once, then spun out into a run of short variations like this one, the way a kitchen brigade would actually work. Liqueur-scented crêpes belong to the same restaurant moment that produced crêpes Suzette, whose invention is traditionally placed at Monte Carlo in the 1890s though the story is more often repeated than documented.