Home › The World's Kitchen › Pancakes Au Chocolat
Pancakes Au Chocolat
Prepare the same quantity of French pancakes, arrange on a hot dish, pour a chocolate sauce over them and serve.
This is an assembly entry: it assumes you have just made the French pancakes from the previous page and only tells you what to do with them. Everything hinges on serving speed, since thin pancakes and warm sauce both go dull as they sit.
- "The same quantity"The instruction points back to the book's French pancake recipe on the preceding page, which is almost certainly a thin crepe batter rather than a leavened American pancake, though that recipe is not reproduced here. A typical batter of this kind runs roughly 1 cup flour, 2 eggs, 1 1/4 cups milk and a pinch of salt, rested so the flour hydrates and the batter pours thin.
- Pan and fatThe recipe itself says nothing about the cooking; for a batter of this type a small pan lightly filmed with clarified butter or oil over medium-high heat works, with each side taking under a minute. The first pancake is usually lost while the pan finds its temperature.
- The hot dish is not optionalCrêpes stiffen and turn leathery within minutes on a cold plate. Warm the serving dish in a 200F oven and stack the finished pancakes there under a cloth or loose foil while you cook the rest.
- Chocolate sauceThe book presumably carries its own chocolate sauce elsewhere; sauces of the period were generally chocolate melted with sugar and a little water or milk, cooked to a pouring consistency. A modern equivalent is 4 oz chopped dark chocolate stirred into 1/2 cup hot cream off the heat, which is less liable to seize or grain than a boiled sugar-and-cocoa sauce.
- YieldIf you use a batter of about a cup of flour, expect roughly a dozen small pancakes, enough for four servings with a cup or so of sauce.
Entries like this one are the connective tissue of a large general cookbook: the batter is written out once, then reused across a run of variations with only the garnish changed. Thin French pancakes served with a sweet sauce belong to the nineteenth-century European dessert repertoire that American cooks inherited. The chocolate sauce is a marker of its moment: by the early twentieth century eating chocolate and cocoa were generally cheaper and more reliable industrial products than the laborious ground cake of a century earlier, so a chocolate sauce was likely less of a luxury than it once had been.