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Currant Pancakes
(England.) Infuse the thin rind of a lemon in 1 pint of warm milk, on the fire, strain it, add 2 ounces butter, 2 ounces of sugar, stir, and add 8 ounces of flour mixed with 6 beaten eggs and 2 tablespoonfuls of water, and a tablespoonful of rum or brandy. Stir in lightly 1 cup of cleaned and dried currants, fry on a griddle, and dust with sugar.
This is an English pancake in the crepe sense — a thin, egg-rich batter cooked flat on a griddle, not a raised American-style stack. Two details carry the dish: the lemon infusion and the currants.
- Currants means dried, not freshThese are Zante currants, the small dried grapes sold near the raisins, not the red or black currants of the garden. "Cleaned and dried" reflects a period when they arrived full of stems and grit; modern packaged currants need only a rinse and a thorough pat dry so they do not weep into the batter.
- Weights to volume8 ounces of flour is about 1 3/4 cups scooped and levelled; 2 ounces of butter is half a stick; 2 ounces of sugar is a scant 1/3 cup. Weighing is worth it here, since the batter's thinness is the whole point.
- The lemon infusionPare the rind in wide strips with a peeler, taking no white pith. The original heats the milk with the rind on the fire; a gentler approach is to bring the milk just to a simmer, then let the rind steep off the heat for 10 to 15 minutes before straining. Prolonged hard boiling can dull the aroma, and any pith left on the rind will taste bitter.
- Order of mixingThe instruction to add flour "mixed with 6 beaten eggs" reads oddly. Whisk the eggs and water into the flour to a smooth thick paste first, then let down gradually with the warm sweetened milk. Tipping the warm milk onto dry flour tends to give lumps that are troublesome to beat out.
- Rest the batterNot in the original, but half an hour at room temperature lets the flour hydrate and the batter thin slightly. It cooks more tenderly and browns more evenly.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 350-375F on an electric griddle, lightly buttered. Ladle thin and tilt to spread; roughly two minutes on the first side, under a minute on the second. Currants sitting on the surface scorch quickly, so keep the heat off high.
- The spiritA tablespoon of rum or brandy in this quantity is essentially for flavour; at that proportion any effect on the batter's texture is negligible. It can be left out with no structural consequence.
- YieldRoughly a dozen to sixteen pancakes of 6 or 7 inches, depending how thin you ladle them, serving four to six. Serve dusted with sugar as directed; lemon wedges alongside are a common English accompaniment, though the recipe does not call for them.
English pancakes have long been thin, closer to a French crepe than to a raised griddle cake, and the pairing with sugar and lemon is old and durable — Shrove Tuesday, the day for using up eggs, butter and fat before Lent, is still called Pancake Day in Britain. Studding the batter with dried currants sits comfortably in the nineteenth-century domestic repertoire, when Zante currants imported from Greece were among the cheaper sweet fruits in a British kitchen and turned up in everything from buns to boiled puddings. The lemon rind steeped in warm milk is a period habit worth reviving: before commercial extracts were widely available, cooks drew flavour out of citrus peel, bay, cinnamon bark or almonds by infusing them directly into the liquid of a dish.