Home › The World's Kitchen › Pancakes with Macaroons
Pancakes with Macaroons
Prepare same quantity French pancakes as in. Place in a bowl two tablespoons currant jelly with an ounce crushed macaroons and half teaspoon maraschino, mix with spoon until well amalgamated, then spread preparation evenly over pancakes, roll up, arrange on a hot dish, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over and serve.
A filled-crêpe dessert that depends entirely on a cross-reference the excerpt does not carry, plus two ingredients whose names have shifted meaning since 1906.
- The missing pancake recipe"French pancakes" here means thin crepes made from a slack egg batter and cooked in a small pan, not raised American breakfast pancakes. Any standard crepe batter -- roughly 1 cup flour, 2 eggs, 1 1/4 cups milk and a little melted butter -- will give pancakes of the right sort, though the excerpt gives no quantity, so how many this filling covers is a matter of judgement.
- Macaroons means almondIn a book of this vintage a macaroon is a crisp almond-and-egg-white biscuit, closest today to Italian amaretti. Coconut macaroons will not work; they are moist and will slump the filling. One ounce crushed is roughly a quarter to a third of a cup of crumbs.
- Maraschino is a liqueurHalf a teaspoon of maraschino means the clear cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of dyed cocktail cherries. If you have none, kirsch is the nearest substitute; the quantity is small and there for perfume rather than sweetness.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, the standard tart preserve of the period, still sold in most supermarkets. Two tablespoons is a thin coating across the whole batch, which is the intent; a thick jam layer will run out of the ends as the pancakes roll.
- Mix, do not warmBeat the jelly, crumbs and liqueur cold with the back of a spoon until it is a smooth paste. Warming it makes the jelly loose and the crumbs sodden, and the filling will leak.
- Assemble at the last minuteThe crumbs begin absorbing the jelly as soon as they are mixed. Spread, roll and serve straight away, on a genuinely hot dish, or the pancakes cool to leather.
- Powdered sugarRead this as confectioners' sugar, sifted over at the table. Some period writers used "powdered" for what we call superfine granulated; either dusts adequately, but confectioners' sugar gives the white finish intended.
- YieldThe excerpt gives no yield, since the pancake quantity sits in the missing cross-reference; as a rough guide, two rolled pancakes make a dessert portion.
The book is Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906); Filippini had spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and the book runs through the European restaurant repertoire a professional of his generation was expected to have at hand. Rolled crêpes with a jam filling were a stock item of that repertoire, cheap to assemble from batter already made and dressed up here with two luxuries of the period: crisp almond macaroons and maraschino, the clear cherry liqueur distilled from marasca cherries around Zara on the Dalmatian coast and shipped worldwide in its straw-wrapped bottle. The instruction to "prepare same quantity French pancakes as in" is the fossil of a page cross-reference, and a reminder that books like this were written for cooks working through a system, not for readers meeting a dish cold.