Home › The World's Kitchen › German Pancakes
German Pancakes
Crack four eggs in a bowl, add six tablespoons flour and one saltspoon salt. Sharply beat up with a whisk for five minutes, then gradually add one and a half gills cold milk, continually mixing for five minutes more. Lightly butter two large frying pans and thoroughly heat them on the fire. Divide the batter, spreading it all over the bottom and sides of the pans. Cook on the fire for one minute, then place in the oven for five minutes. Remove to the oven door, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over them, return to the oven for three minutes more. Remove, glide them on two different dishes, and serve with six "quarters" of sound lemon and powdered sugar separately.
This is a batter pancake baked in the pan rather than flipped — the ancestor of what American cooks now call a Dutch baby. The batter is thin and eggy, so the pans must be genuinely hot before it goes in.
- Gills and saltspoonsOne and a half gills of milk is three-quarters of a cup (about 180 ml). A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon.
- Oven heatFilippini gives no temperature; a pancake of this kind wants a hot oven, 425–450°F, so the edges climb the sides of the pan and set before the centre dries out.
- The pansTwo heavy pans, cast iron or steel, 9–10 inches across, with oven-safe handles. Heat them empty until the butter foams and just colours — batter poured into a lukewarm pan will sit flat and turn leathery.
- BeatingTen minutes of hand whisking sounds excessive but it is doing real work: dissolving the flour completely and beating air into the eggs, which is all the lift this batter gets. A blender for 30 seconds will do much of the same work. Let it rest a few minutes if you can.
- "Remove to the oven door"This means drawing the pans to the open oven mouth to sugar them, not moving them elsewhere. The final three minutes are there to melt and lightly caramelise the sugar; watch it, as powdered sugar scorches quickly at this heat.
- Gliding outThe pancake should slide free if the pan was properly buttered and hot. Serve immediately — it deflates within a minute or two of leaving the oven, which is normal and does not spoil it.
- YieldTwo pancakes, serving two generously or four as part of a larger breakfast. The six lemon quarters are for squeezing at the table, alongside more powdered sugar.
Baked pancakes of this type belong to a broad German and Austrian family of egg batters cooked in a pan and finished in the oven, with cousins such as the shredded Kaiserschmarrn further south. Filippini's version is essentially the same construction that American restaurants later popularised as the "Dutch baby," a name often said to have originated at Manca's Cafe in Seattle, though the account is anecdotal rather than documented, and in any case has nothing to do with anything Dutch. The lemon and powdered sugar served separately is the older European habit, and arguably closer to a French crêpe service than to the syrup-and-butter treatment American pancakes were already receiving by 1900. The recipe also shows the professional hand behind the book: two pans worked at once, precise minute counts, and the assumption of a range and a hot oven in constant use.