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Rice Pancakes
Place in a bowl three ounces rice flour with half saltspoon salt, three eggs, three gills cold milk and a teaspoon vanilla essence. Sharply mix with a whisk for five minutes, strain the preparation through a Chinese strainer into another bowl and proceed to make the cakes.
This is a crêpe batter rather than a raised pancake, and the original assumes you already know the frying method from a neighbouring entry. The proportions are sound; the only real work is in the handling.
- The measurementsThree gills is 1 1/2 cups (about 355 ml) of milk. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half of one is a generous pinch. Three ounces of rice flour is roughly 2/3 cup by volume, though weighing is more reliable with rice flour.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the conical fine-mesh sieve. Any fine sieve works. The point is to catch lumps of unhydrated rice flour, which does not dissolve as readily as wheat.
- No leavening, no fatThere is no baking powder and no butter in the batter. These are thin, tender, crêpe-style cakes, not fluffy American pancakes. The fat would have gone into the pan instead — a light film of clarified butter, wiped out between cakes — though the original leaves the frying to a neighbouring entry and says nothing about it.
- Rest the batterAfter straining, let it stand 20-30 minutes. Rice flour is slow to hydrate and the batter thickens noticeably as it sits; thin with a spoonful of milk if it stops running freely.
- Stir before every cakeRice starch is heavy and has no gluten to hold it in suspension, so it settles to the bottom of the bowl within minutes. Give the batter a turn with the whisk before each ladleful or the first cakes will be thin and the last ones pasty.
- The panMedium heat, a 7-8 inch pan, about 3 tablespoons of batter swirled to coat. Rice-flour cakes brown more slowly and stay paler than wheat ones; go by the edges lifting and the surface losing its gloss, roughly a minute a side.
- Yield and servingAt the 3 tablespoons a cake suggested above the quantities run to a dozen or so thin cakes. There is no sugar in the batter, only vanilla; jam, stewed fruit or a dusting of caster sugar would suit, though the original says nothing about serving.
Rice flour cakes turn up in European cookery books throughout the nineteenth century as a light alternative to wheat, valued partly for delicacy and partly, it is often said, because rice was inexpensive and stored well in a dry larder. The vanilla essence and the instruction to strain through a chinois may suggest a French-trained hand, though neither tool nor flavouring was beyond the reach of a domestic cook, and straining a batter of only four ingredients is a habit associated with the kitchen brigade. Whatever its source, the dish here is a crêpe in everything but its flour.