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Macaroon Pancakes
(A French recipe.) Mix 1 tablespoonful of rice flour and 2 tablespoonfuls of milk, taken from a pint of milk and set aside. Beat the yolks of 4 eggs, add the rest of the milk, 1 spoonful of melted butter, and 2 ounces of sugar. Stir on the fire until thick but not boiling, cool it, add 2 tablespoonfuls of chopped candied peel, a little cinnamon, 1/4 pound of stale, crushed macaroons, and a spoonful of orangeflower water. Finally, add the white of a well-beaten egg and 2 whole eggs. Pour into a buttered dish, bake until brown, and roll up, with a filling of apricot, green gage, or gooseberry jam. Glaze the top with sugar before serving.
This is a baked custard batter rather than a griddle pancake — a thin, flexible sheet meant to be rolled around jam while still warm. Two things decide whether it works: keeping the custard below a simmer, and spreading the batter thin enough to roll.
- The hinge: don't boil the custardFour yolks with milk and sugar will curdle at around 180F. Stir over low heat until it coats the spoon, then pull it off; the rice flour slurry gives some insurance but not much.
- Which macaroonsAn almond macaroon is meant here — the crisp, chewy French or Italian kind, close to today's amaretti — not the coconut macaroon. A quarter pound is about 115 g, crushed to coarse crumbs. Stale ones are specified because they absorb the custard without turning to paste.
- "A spoonful"The recipe alternates between "tablespoonful" and plain "spoonful." Read the unqualified ones as tablespoons for the butter and orange flower water; both are forgiving, though orange flower water is strong and a scant tablespoon is plenty.
- Egg countTotal eggs used: 4 yolks in the custard, plus 2 whole eggs and 1 beaten white folded in at the end. Fold the white last and gently; there is no chemical leavening in the recipe, so the eggs are all the lift the batter gets.
- Candied peelTwo tablespoons chopped candied peel; the recipe does not say which, though citrus peel is the usual reading. Modern supermarket peel is often coarse and dry; chop it fine or soak it briefly in warm water so it doesn't tear the sheet when rolling.
- Pan and ovenButter a shallow baking dish or quarter-sheet pan so the batter sits no more than about 1/2 inch deep. The recipe gives no temperature or time, only 'bake until brown'; a moderate oven of around 375F for roughly 20 to 25 minutes should set and brown it. A deep dish will give you a pudding you cannot roll.
- Rolling and fillingLoosen the edges and roll while warm and pliable; a cooled sheet cracks. Spread the jam thinly — apricot, greengage or gooseberry all suit, and a slightly slack jam spreads more easily than a stiff set one.
- Glazing the top'Glaze with sugar' most likely means dust with sifted sugar and caramelise it under a hot iron, the salamander of Victorian kitchens, though a plain sugar dusting is also possible. A broiler for a minute or two, watched closely, or a kitchen torch does the same job.
- YieldOne sheet rolled and cut across gives 4 to 6 servings. Best eaten warm the day it is made; the macaroon crumbs soften overnight.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea can be read alongside a body of turn-of-the-century books in which a cook toured European kitchens and brought home the dishes, each tagged with its nationality — hence the bare parenthesis "(A French recipe.)" doing the work of a headnote. What is described here is essentially a pannequet, the French borrowing of "pancake," which in nineteenth-century French practice meant a thin sheet spread with jam and rolled or folded rather than anything cooked to order on a griddle. The almond macaroon it is built on was a European convent and confectioner's biscuit long before the coconut version took over the name in English-speaking countries, and using up stale ones in a pudding may well have been a familiar thrift. The orange flower water and candied peel place the dish squarely in older French pastry, where distilled flower waters did the flavouring work later handed to vanilla extract. Greengage, one of the three jams offered, is generally traced to Sir William Gage, who is said to have introduced the plum to England in the early eighteenth century.