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Peach Pancakes
Prepare a French pancake batter. In addition, add to the batter two preserved peaches finely chopped up. Lightly mix with the batter, then proceed to finish the cakes the same way.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have the base recipe in hand. Everything hinges on the batter being a thin crêpe batter rather than a raised American pancake batter.
- French pancake batterThis means a crepe batter: flour, eggs, milk, a pinch of salt, a little sugar and melted butter, thinned to the consistency of cream, with no chemical leavening. The book's own base recipe governs the exact proportions. Resting the batter half an hour helps the flour hydrate and keeps the cakes tender.
- Preserved peachesPeriod preserved peaches were generally halves put up in heavy sugar syrup, closer to today's canned peaches in syrup than to jam. Drain them well and blot dry, or the extra syrup will slacken the batter.
- Chop fine, and mean itPieces much larger than a pea are liable to tear a crepe when you turn it. Chop to a coarse mince and fold in at the last moment, as the recipe's "lightly mix" suggests; overmixing develops gluten and toughens the cakes.
- Sugar and the panFruit in syrup browns fast. Work over medium rather than high heat in a buttered pan and expect the peach pieces to catch and caramelize slightly before the batter around them sets.
- Yield and servingThe yield depends entirely on the size of the base batter, so judge it from that recipe. French pancakes were commonly rolled or folded and dusted with powdered sugar; a spoonful of the peach syrup warmed with a little butter makes an appropriate sauce.
- Fresh peaches insteadIf substituting fresh fruit, cook the dice briefly in butter and sugar first. Raw peach releases water into the batter and steams rather than browns.
Turn-of-the-century American cookbooks written by hotel and restaurant chefs often built their books in chains: a master preparation is given once, then followed by a run of short variations that say little more than what to add. This peach pancake reads as one link in such a chain, and its brevity may reflect a professional kitchen, where a cook was expected to know a crêpe batter by heart. The reliance on preserved peaches rather than fresh is equally telling. Peaches are a fleeting late-summer fruit, and before reliable long-distance refrigeration one way to have them in February was in a jar of syrup, whether put up at home or bought from one of the canneries that expanded rapidly in the United States through the last quarter of the nineteenth century; dried and evaporated peaches were another standard off-season form. A dish like this belongs to the off-season, when the store cupboard was the only orchard available.