Pancakes
It’s amazing what slight differences in method or ingredient can make to a dish. It’s even more amazing how those slight differences can create a sense of “This dish belongs to this country.”
These differences operate over time as well as space - think of the higher fat of the food from the ‘Regency Gothic’ tests. Menu creators in the early nineteenth century used salt and acid to mask the fat in a dish, or to balance blandness. Sweet cakes were placed alongside chicken and other savouries to bring out the flavours. It all worked in the test last night, once our palates stoped expecting what we knew.
Tonight I’m giving you my grandmother’s pancake recipes to celebrate the particular palate of a given time and place. The pancakes of my childhood were far less American than the pancakes of my adulthood, and I didn’t know why until I looked in my grandmother’s little book.
Think back to the 1950s. Saturday night dances. 2d to spend on sweets (Jaffas to roll down the wooden aisles and upset the ushers, for preference) at the local corner shop during intermission (after the cliff-hanger series), then race back inside for the main film.
These are the pancakes Australians ate back then.
When I had the first recipe (except with less salt!) in the mid sixties, we would dribble lemon juice from the lemons we had just picked and sprinkle sugar over the pancakes before rolling them.
Pancakes
2 eggs, ¾ pint milk, ¼ pound flour, ½ teaspoon baking powder, 1 saltspoon salt.
Beat eggs. Mix in flour and a little milk till you have a smooth paste, add the rest of the milk and salt, let it stand for 1 hour. Just before frying add the baking powder. Fry in a very little butter rubbed on the bottom of a hot pan. Roll and serve hot!
French Pancakes
Half pint milk, 2 ounces butter, 2 eggs, 2 ounces sugar, a pinch of salt, ½ teaspoon baking powder.
Cream the butter. Add sugar, flour, milk and eggs. The flour and sugar should be warmed, the baking-powder and salt sifted into the flour. Mix well and pour into buttered saucers. Bake from 20 mts to ½ hr in fairly quick oven. Serve with cream and jam.
April 26th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
My Mum always used to use self-raising flour and let the mix sit. The pancakes were thick and stodgy and a bit of a challenge to roll (you had to roll them!) They gave me a stomach ache so I changed to plain flour and not letting the mix ferment, which seemed to fix the stomache ache problem.
And I love the crisp crepey edges you get.
April 29th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Interesting that it solved the stomach ache problem. I find them much easier to fry when they’ve sat that hour.
July 12th, 2007 at 4:52 am
[...] in the electric pan - they would put their favourite topings on. Now, I’ve already blogged pancakes, so I ned to find you another recipe. Nicole’s mother also made spag bol (the Aussie version [...]