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Pancakes with Marrons
Use the same recipe as for cream pancakes, but fill with a puree of cooked chestnuts, sweetened and flavored with maraschino cordial. Dust each, on the dish, with sugar and glaze until brown. Serve with orange marmalade or lemon syrup.
A short cross-reference recipe of the kind common in turn-of-the-century books: the batter lives elsewhere, and this page only tells you what to put inside. A few terms need translating before it will run.
- "Cream pancakes" means thin crêpes"Cream pancakes" means thin crepes -- The base recipe referred to is not given on this page, but the name points to a thin pancake rather than an American breakfast pancake. If you are working without the companion recipe, use any crepe batter of roughly 1 cup flour, 2 eggs, 1 1/4 cups milk and a spoonful of melted butter, rested half an hour.
- Marrons are chestnutsThe word is French for chestnut, properly the large cultivated kind. Canned unsweetened chestnut puree is the direct modern substitute; sweetened creme de marrons is also sold and needs no further sugar.
- If you start from whole nutsScore, roast or boil until the shells and inner skins come away, then simmer the peeled nuts in milk or light syrup until they crush under a spoon. Sieve or process; a granular purée will tear the pancakes as you roll them.
- Maraschino cordial is not cherry syrupIt means the clear, dry Dalmatian cherry-stone liqueur, not the pink liquid from a jar of cocktail cherries. Luxardo and similar bottles are the modern equivalent; a tablespoon or two into the puree is enough, as chestnut takes flavour readily.
- "Glaze until brown"In kitchens of this period the usual method was dusting with sugar and passing a red-hot salamander over the surface. Use a broiler at its highest setting, rack close to the element, for one to three minutes, or a kitchen torch. Watch continuously; the sugar goes from caramel to bitter in seconds and the pancake edges scorch first.
- Filling and shapingSpread the purée on the paler side of each pancake, roll or fold in four, and set them on an ovenproof serving dish, seam down, before glazing. A metal or stoneware dish takes the broiler heat; glass and porcelain platters may not.
- The accompanimentOrange marmalade should be warmed and loosened with a spoonful of water so it pours; lemon syrup is sugar and lemon juice boiled briefly to a light syrup. Serve either alongside rather than over the glazed sugar, which will soften on contact.
- YieldA cup of chestnut purée fills about eight crêpes, enough for four as a dessert. Glaze and serve immediately.
Chestnut purée under its French name appears throughout Anglo-American cookbooks of this era as a marker of continental refinement, and a book called With a Saucepan Over the Sea is explicit about where its ideas were gathered. Vienna and Budapest both built dessert repertoires on sweetened chestnut, most famously the piped chestnut vermicelli sold as Kastanienreis or gesztenyepüré, and rolled, filled, sugar-glazed pancakes belong to the same broad tradition as the Hungarian palacsinta and the Austrian Palatschinken. The direction to glaze until brown would, in a kitchen of this period, have meant the salamander — a long-handled disc of iron heated in the fire and held above the food.