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Pancake Day: the Romans would have loved it
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 20/02/2007
Fried batter has a long and delicious history in Britain, finds Kate Colquhoun
The simplest - and best - pancake batter can be made with 2oz plain flour, 3oz milk and a pinch of salt to each large egg, all whisked together. Use a heavy pan - not the nonstick variety. My mother always fried pancakes in lard.
Butter tends to burn, but sunflower rather than olive oil (which tastes wrong) is a good alternative. The trick is to have the oil shimmering hot and then to turn the heat down to medium. Keep the pancakes thin and cook no longer than half a minute on the first side and far less on the second.
For anyone who grew up in the Sixties and Seventies, Jif lemon, the stiff crunch of granulated sugar and mother's assurance that "the first pancake always goes in the bin" provide early memories of Shrove Tuesday.
As Lent now stretches out in all its 40 unforgiving days, spare a thought for what you are eating - for the British love affair with batter is so ancient that its production might be in our very blood.
In Roman Britain, pancakes could be bought hot from vendors on the corners of the new market squares. In the Middle Ages, when the rigours of the Church required total abstinence from meat and all dairy produce every fast day, particularly Lent, villagers used up perishable eggs in pain perdu, the earliest form of eggy bread, fried golden in butter.
The very rich, though, enjoyed something far more seductive; "the food of angels" was batter allowed to stream through the cook's fingers into hot oil to make crespes, and served with honey or finely grated sugar.
These were offered only to the most powerful guests - along with spiced wines and crispy wafers made in heated circular irons and stamped with figures of saints or coats of arms. Shivered with sugar and expensive spices, wafers vibrated with resonances of the Eucharist, centrepieces of an important, semi-religious ritual that cemented social bonds of power and loyalty.
Sugared batter was a luxury for the very few, whereas vautesor - folded pancakes stuffed with savoury-sweet combinations, such as veal kidneys chopped with dates, saffron and ginger - were enjoyed more widely.
By the early 1600s, communal eating in the manorial hall was becoming a distant memory and tastes were changing. Eleanor Fettiplace, a young Stuart countrywoman recorded in her recipe notebook that she preferred hervautes, pancakes made velvety with cream, scented with cinnamon and rosewater and filled with a rich, dried-fruit paste.
Throughout the seventeenth century, the price of sugar fell and increasing numbers came under its spell. In the 1750s, the writer William Ellis published three recipes for pancakes designed for different budgets.
The poor could make theirs with water, eggs and flour and use lard for frying, and the gentry could add apples deep-fried in butter. Those with deeper pockets could order their cooks to ladle in cream, butter and sherry-like sack, giving it all a final grating of nutmeg - the very breath of Georgian cooking.
Then, in upper-class dining rooms, a new culinary invention began to drive diners wild: known as ''quire of paper'', this new pancake was made with a cream-rich batter, cooked as vast and whisper-thin as possible on charcoal-fired stoves. Traditionally, it was served with sugar, butter and a scrape of nutmeg and with bowls of thickened creams redolent with the volatile oils of lemons and oranges.
A handful of generations later, when Marie-Antoine Carême was cooking for the gluttonous Regent at the turn of the nineteenth century and when everyone seemed to be sighing over meringue rather than batter, the pancake evolved into little amuse geulesor croquettes ''in the Russian manner'', wrapped around bite-size amounts of minced fowl or game, dipped in egg yolk, rolled in crumbs, and fried.
The suety Victorians preferred moulded bombes, jellies and charlottes, but during the Edwardian ''Indian Summer'' sweet pancakes were again de rigeur for dinner parties, with glacé or expensive, forced hothouse fruits, and a scattering of petits fours.
By the 1930s, pancakes were considered the very height of Riviera elegance by cigarette-smoking hostesses who thrilled to the theatricality of crêpes Suzette, set aflame with brandy and Curaçao at the table. Pancakes Barbara also appeared, gorgeous with whipped cream, vanilla ice cream, blanched walnuts and glossy hot chocolate sauce - so indulgent that the society writer Elsie de Wolfe felt constrained to follow her own published recipe with the sharp encouragement: ''this is not a joke''.
But in 1935, Vogue advised readers that ''pancakes are frankly difficult and not worth eating at all unless they are of paper thinness and succulent tenderness''.
By the Sixties, crêpes Suzettes were being sold in tins and for families on the go, prepacked had replaced slow-whisking and rapid-frying. Ever on the look-out for culinary adventure, Marguerite Patten popularised the savoury pancake stuffed with anything from crabmeat to chicken and peas.
There's still something elementally comforting about the annual indulgence of a basic batter, frilled brown at the edges, the lemon and sugar in perfectly choreographed battle with the fats, everyone waiting for each hot delight to emerge from the pan, willing it to be theirs. Simple as it might seem, whether it burns, sticks or arrives meltingly perfect on your plate, the humble pancake perpetuates an important part of our own particular kitchen history. # • Kate Colquhoun's Taste: A Biography of British Food will be published in October by Bloomsbury
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I LUVVA the pancake, made them the other night (got the preggie cravings) for me and the husband and he was scraping the plate in delight by the time he finished...
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yea I thought about that but shipping goes by weight and I much more prefer some good quality (not made in china) baby clothes instead...although I am getting desperate to have her send me some worsteshire sauce and soy sauce...at least some packets or something!!
by the way the butter pecan syrup sounds dreamy, omg, you have no idea... I'm planning to go home by this time next year with the baby to visit and I plan to eat out everyday and savor the moment before I leave again...
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Smuckers, you need to go to Carrefour. They have all those sauces and so much more.
Posts: 3291 | From: I DO believe in Karma! | Registered: Apr 2002
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