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Pancakes with Chocolate
Prepare the French pancakes, dress on a hot dish and keep hot. Pour one and a half gills cold milk in a small saucepan with two ounces of grated chocolate, place the pan on the fire and boil for five minutes, occasionally stirring. Have in another small saucepan two ounces granulated sugar, two egg yolks and a half teaspoon vanilla essence; briskly mix for two minutes, then gradually add the milk and chocolate, continually mixing meanwhile. Place the pan on the fire, mix for five minutes, remove, strain the sauce over the pancakes and serve.
A crêpe dish finished with a chocolate crème anglaise. The whole recipe hinges on the second cooking: the sauce contains egg yolks and must never boil.
- The hinge — do not boil the custardOnce the yolks go in, hold the pan over low heat and stir constantly until the sauce coats the back of a spoon, around 170-180F. The stated "five minutes" is a guide; at a full boil the yolks scramble and the straining step will not rescue it.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills is 3/4 cup of milk. Whole milk gives the body the recipe expects.
- "Place the pan on the fire"Direct heat on a coal or gas range. On a modern burner use medium for the milk-and-chocolate boil and low for the custard, or set the second pan over barely simmering water if you want insurance.
- The chocolateTwo ounces of grated chocolate in 1906 usually meant plain unsweetened or lightly sweetened block chocolate. Unsweetened or 70% dark works; with only 2 oz sugar in the yolk mixture, milk chocolate will make the sauce cloying.
- French pancakesCrêpes, not raised American griddle cakes — a thin egg-and-milk batter cooked in a small skillet and rolled or folded. "Dress on a hot dish" means arrange them overlapping on a warmed platter so they do not stiffen while the sauce is made.
- Strain, and mean itStraining catches any chalazae, undissolved chocolate grit and the first threads of curdled yolk. Pour the sauce over the pancakes at the moment of serving; it thickens and skins as it cools.
- YieldThe sauce as written comes to roughly a cup. The recipe gives no quantity for the pancakes or number of servings, so how far it stretches is a matter of judgement.
Alexander Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) is arranged as short entries indexed by dish, and this is a characteristic one: it assumes you already know how to make the pancakes and only tells you what distinguishes this version. The sauce is a chocolate creme anglaise — the standard French egg-yolk custard sauce, here built by boiling the chocolate into the milk first rather than melting it in at the end. Filippini was long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and the entry reflects the professional French repertoire as it was practised in American restaurants of the period. Chocolate as a dessert-sauce flavouring rather than a drink was well established by then, helped by the wide availability of pressed cocoa and eating chocolate from the middle of the nineteenth century onward.