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Imperial Schmarn
(German pancakes.) Whisk the yolks of 5 eggs with 1 pint of cream, or rich milk, and beat the whites very stiff. Add to the yolks and cream 4 ounces of flour and 1 tablespoonful of sugar, 1 ounce of raisins, and 1 ounce of chopped almonds. Then add the beaten whites, stir and fry on a griddle with 2 ounces of butter, either whole or in 3 parts. Let it brown; when light, sift it with sugar and serve with preserves or hot vanilla or wine sauce.
A verbatim recipe for Kaiserschmarrn, written for a cook who already knew the dish. The one thing the text never says outright is that the pancake is meant to be torn up: Schmarrn means scraps or shreds, and the finished cake should be pulled into rough pieces in the pan before the sugar goes on.
- Tear it, don't serve it whole"Either whole or in 3 parts" is ambiguous: it may refer to the butter, or to how much batter goes into the pan at a time. Either way, once the underside is set and browned, flip it, then cut and tear it into irregular bite-sized pieces with two forks or a spatula and let the torn edges caramelise in the butter for a minute or two.
- The measures1 pint is 2 cups; 4 ounces of flour is a scant cup by volume, and weighing it is better here. An ounce of raisins is about 3 tablespoons, an ounce of chopped almonds about a quarter cup.
- The batter is very thinTwo cups of cream to four ounces of flour gives something closer to crepe batter than pancake batter, which is why the whipped whites matter so much. If you want the sturdier, fluffier texture most people expect from Kaiserschmarrn, use 1 to 1 1/4 cups of milk rather than the full pint.
- Whites folded, not stirredThe original says "stir," but treat it as folding. Add the stiff whites in two additions with a spatula and stop while streaks are still visible; the lift in this dish comes entirely from them.
- Griddle to skilletA flat griddle will not hold this batter. Use a heavy 10-inch skillet, ideally cast iron or an ovenproof nonstick, with the butter divided between the batches. Medium heat: high heat browns the outside before the custardy interior sets.
- Finishing in the ovenIf the centre is still loose after the flip, move the pan to a 400F oven for 5 to 8 minutes, then tear and return it to the burner to crisp the torn edges.
- "Sift it with sugar"This means dust it through a sieve, and powdered sugar is what is wanted for the dusting. Sugar is also often thrown into the hot butter with the torn pieces to caramelise, though granulated sugar is usually used for that step.
- RaisinsSoak them 15 minutes in warm water, or in rum if you are serving the wine sauce, so they do not scorch in the pan.
- YieldServes four as a dessert, or two to three as the sweet main course it often is in Austria. Serve immediately with stewed plums, applesauce or the hot wine sauce suggested.
Kaiserschmarrn is an Austrian dish of the Habsburg era, and the name is usually rendered "emperor's scraps" — the Schmarrn being a humble word for a mess or a shredded scrap of pancake, incongruously paired with the imperial title. A cluster of traditional stories attaches the name to Franz Joseph I, variously as a shepherd's dish he admired, a pancake torn up to disguise a kitchen failure, or a sweet made for the Empress Elisabeth and eaten by her husband instead; none is documented, and one of several competing conjectures is simply that Kaiser marked a richer, egg-and-cream version of a common peasant Schmarrn. That this cookbook calls it "Imperial Schmarn" and glosses it plainly as "German pancakes" is telling: to an English-speaking reader, Austrian and German cooking were largely one category, and the shredded pancake had no established English name to borrow.