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Cream Pancakes
(Paris.) Whisk the yolks of 3 eggs and the whites of 2, separately, add a small cup of cream, a tablespoonful of sugar, and enough flour to make a batter, also butter the size of an egg. Fry this in butter, roll it up with a filling of apricot or plum jam. Can be made in one or more cakes.
A thin French pancake batter enriched with cream and whipped white, rolled around jam. The original leaves both the flour and the pan size to judgment, so a little arithmetic helps before you start.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe whites are whisked separately, and are best folded in last, after the flour, with the batter cooked promptly. Beaten in hard they will give a denser pancake than the lighter texture the separate whisking presumably aims at.
- A small cup of creamCup measures of the period were not closely standardised; a "small cup" here is probably around 1/2 cup, and heavy or whipping cream is the better choice. Modern light cream will give a thinner, less tender batter.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Melt it and let it cool slightly before adding, or it will begin to cook the yolks.
- "Enough flour to make a batter"With three yolks, two whites, 1/2 cup cream and the melted butter, start with about 1/2 cup of flour and add only enough more to reach the consistency of thin cream. It should coat a spoon but run freely off it.
- Pan and heatUse an 8-inch skillet over medium heat with a film of butter, not a pool. Butter alone browns quickly at crêpe temperature, so wipe the pan and re-butter between cakes.
- One large or several smallThe note about "one or more cakes" is real latitude: poured all at once into a wide pan the batter makes a single thick pancake that wants a couple of minutes a side, while ladled thin it makes four or five that cook in under a minute each.
- The jamWarm the apricot or plum jam slightly and thin it with a spoonful of water if it is stiff, or it may tear the pancake as you roll. A dusting of sugar over the finished rolls is a common finish.
- YieldServes two to three as a dessert.
This is a Parisian household dessert of the kind called crêpes à la confiture or pannequets — the latter a French borrowing of the English word "pancake," used for a filled, rolled pancake. Books of this kind, gathering dishes tagged by the city they were eaten in, were a product of the late-Victorian and Edwardian travelling middle class. The vagueness about flour quantity is characteristic rather than careless — batter was judged by eye, and a writer of the period assumed the reader had made pancakes often enough to know what the spoon should look like.