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French Pancakes
Four ounces sifted flour, half ounce powdered sugar, two whole raw eggs, one saltspoon salt, three-quarters pint good cold milk, eight drops vanilla essence, four drops orange flavouring and a tablespoon Jamaica rum. Place the flour in a vessel, break in the eggs, add the sugar, salt, essences and the milk gradually. With a wire whisk briskly beat up the whole together for five minutes, or until thoroughly thickened. Then pass it through a Chinese strainer into another small vessel and let stand for thirty minutes. Have a tablespoon melted butter on a saucer. Have a small frying pan, six inches in diameter at the bottom, lightly greased with the butter by means of a small hair pastry brush. When the bottom of the pan is thoroughly hot pour the equivalent of three tablespoons of the preparation into the pan (at once) and fry on a brisk fire till of a nice golden colour--which will take about a minute--turn it over and fry exactly the same. Be very careful not to allow the cakes to get black. Carefully turn the cake on a hot plate on the corner of the range. Proceed to make eleven more exactly the same way. Lightly dredge with fine sugar the one on top, roll it up nicely and dredge just a little more sugar over. Lay it on a hot dish. Proceed the same way with the others and serve very hot.
This is a plain crêpe batter, thinner and eggier than an American pancake, cooked one at a time and rolled with sugar. The measurements are by weight and by old liquid units, so a scale helps.
- Flour and sugar by weightFour ounces of flour is about 115 g, roughly a scant cup of all-purpose measured by scoop. Half an ounce of sugar is about 14 g, roughly one heaped tablespoon to two, depending on how fine the sugar is.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. It is not optional in a sweet batter this lean.
- The milk measure is ambiguousThree-quarters of a pint is 12 fl oz (1½ cups) by US measure and 15 fl oz by imperial. Start with 1½ cups; the finished batter should coat a spoon thinly and run like heavy cream, and you can thin it further if it does not spread when it hits the pan.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve does the job, which is simply to catch lumps and cords of egg white.
- The thirty-minute restResting lets the flour hydrate and the gluten slacken, which is generally credited with making the crepes more tender and less likely to tear when turned. Skipping it tends to give tougher, more elastic cakes.
- "Brisk fire"Medium-high on a modern burner. The pan must be hot enough that the batter sets almost as it spreads, but the instruction not to let the cakes blacken is real: butter browns fast in a thin film.
- Orange flavouring and vanilla essenceVanilla essence and orange flavouring -- Vanilla extract and orange extract. Eight drops of vanilla and four of orange are small amounts, very roughly an eighth and a sixteenth of a teaspoon; modern extracts are strong, so err low.
- The rumA tablespoon of Jamaica rum flavours the batter. It can be left out with no other change.
- YieldTwelve six-inch crêpes, serving four as a dessert. Stack them on a plate set over a pan of hot water rather than the corner of a coal range.
These are crêpes. The tell is in the equipment and the vocabulary: a hair pastry brush, a Chinese strainer, a six-inch pan reserved for the purpose, and the assumption that a cook will stand and turn twelve cakes in sequence — the marks of a cook trained in French restaurant technique writing for American household hands. The name "French pancakes" was standard in English-language cookbooks well before "crêpe" became familiar to general readers, and it distinguished this thin, egg-rich, unleavened batter from the raised American griddle cake. The rum and the double flavoring of vanilla and orange belong to the same broad repertoire as crêpes Suzette, popularized in restaurant dining rooms, though the various origin stories attached to it are traditional rather than documented.