Home › The World's Kitchen › Pancakes, Georgette
Pancakes, Georgette
Prepare a plain pancake batter. Cut out, crosswise, from a small pineapple six slices as thin as possible, cut each slice in eight equal pieces and add them to the batter; then proceed dredging a teaspoon fine sugar over each pancake before serving.
A one-line restaurant note rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have a thin French-style pancake batter and a hot pan. The only real work is getting the pineapple thin enough that it cooks through in the time the pancake takes.
- "Plain pancake batter"Most likely a thin, pourable batter of flour, eggs, milk and salt rather than a thick, chemically leavened breakfast batter, though the recipe does not specify; letting whatever batter you use rest before cooking helps the flour hydrate.
- Cutting the pineappleSix crosswise slices, each cut into eight, gives 48 small wedges. "As thin as possible" suggests something on the order of an eighth of an inch or less. Core the slices first — the core stays woody however thin you cut it.
- Fresh versus cannedFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protein-digesting enzyme that is deactivated by cooking heat, so it is unlikely to trouble the batter in the short time before the pancakes reach the pan. Canned rings work but must be drained and blotted dry, or the extra syrup loosens the batter and the pancakes stick.
- Distributing the fruitFold the pieces in rather than stirring, and ladle from the bottom of the bowl each time; the wedges sink fast and the last pancakes otherwise get all the fruit.
- Pan and heatA lightly buttered pan and only enough batter to coat it thinly; cook briefly on each side, long enough for the pineapple to soften.
- The sugarA teaspoon of fine (caster) sugar dredged over each pancake at the moment of serving is the finish the recipe calls for; no further glazing is specified.
Dishes labelled with a woman's given name — Georgette, Suzette, Melba, Rachel — belong to the French restaurant naming habit of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a chef honoured a patron, a singer or an actress by attaching her name to a preparation and expecting the kitchen to remember what it meant. The convention is why so many entries in books of this era read as shorthand rather than instruction: a professional cook was assumed to know the base preparation and needed only the distinguishing element, here the thin pineapple and the sugar glaze. The relation to other "Georgette" preparations is not documented, and the name is best read as a house label rather than a tradition with a fixed meaning.