Locke is a bit early for this, but if you like this kind of thing, then you'll love Townsends' channel about 18th century living, focused on cooking.[1] Seriously, they have over 18 seasons worth of "18th Century Cooking"[2]
I think Taking History has a broader coverage, his videos are longer and includes quite a lot of historical context and not just limiting to 17th/18th centuries or to American/English dishes.
Here is Tasting History's Pancake episode, from the same period as Locke. It appears to be similar, using cream and nutmeg, and Max whips the egg and cream for a while to add air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD3WKbXhm6M
Until then, I'm curious about how much the oats cook thru. As a lover of oatmeal cookies, I prefer the oats to be less detente. Do you let your batter sit for a while, to give the oats time to pre-soften?
I've experimented with "oat milk" as a smoothie base (in lieu of yoghurt). I've read that honey and banana have some enzyme that breaks down the oats. So I toss in one (or both), frappé the oats, then let it sit for at least 1/2 hour. I guess my goal is to make sure my tummy is getting the benefit of whatever nutrients the oats may have.
Home-made oat milk tastes pretty good too, so I don't miss the yoghurt.
> I was surprised by how smooth they looked in the photo!
Took me a few tries to get there. As mentioned in other reply, lower heat and longer than typical pancake cooking time is important to avoid breaking while flipping.
Having more than one pan going also key since they're slower to cook.
I expected this too, but is now one of the three pancake recipes I regularly use and on the "healthier" side. Don't over-blend and you should be ok. They do take lower heat to cook (and thus longer to flip) than typical pancakes.
It gets more random than that ;) xenodium.com is an accidental blog really. It started as a single org file I used to take notes. At some point, I exported it to html and here we are...
Jeff Bezos, a notorious pancake aficionado, per the NY Times is allegedly fond of a recipe from the Joy of Cooking, which he would make for executives that would visit his home.
Sorry for the Twitter link, but unlike the actual recipe on their site, there’s no paywall here. Note it requires a cast iron skillet, which isn’t clearly called out here. Serve it with some syrup and fried apple slices.
My pancake trick is to make very thin pancakes—not quite crepe thin but pretty close—and then have a stack of them. Layered like an actual cake. That's how my grandmother used to make them. They're so much more tasteful when they're not thick and floury.
My hunch is no baking powder. I've made pancakes without baking powder by heavily beating the eggs before gently folding in the other ingredients. Haven't tried this particular recipe.
0.2l Milk, 2 eggs, 80g flour, 15g butter, 30g sugar, 85g beer. Mix milk, eggs, and everything else except the butter and beer. Melt the butter and mix it in too. Add beer, drink the rest. Then make pancakes.
Except you add the cream after beating the eggs and flour in the original recipe.
Today's waffle and some pancake batter recipes will call for beating the eggs until light and fluffy, which takes a few minutes in a mixer and could take 15 minutes by hand. Then you typically fold or mix the flour and dairy (milk, cream, or buttermilk) into the eggs, alternating small amounts of each. Then add the clarified butter. That's how I would adapt the recipe to the use of a mixer.
Also, I would make sure to use salted butter in this recipe or add a small amount of salt.
Whoa this flashed me back to being 14 years old, hearing nutmeg could get you high, and splitting an entire bottle of ground nutmeg with a friend. Felt like I had the flu for 2 days. Yeesh its good young people are resilient.
Should've tried the oil, it's much better. I'm currently investigating it as a microdosing nootropic, and results have been quite positive. I probably wouldn't recommend it for long term consistent usage though, because I would be fearful of long term toxicity build-up. More like an occasional creativity boost.
It's about half the level you'll start feeling the symptoms of toxicity from what I've seen. So you should be fine unless extremely underweight, but I wouldn't sprinkle any nutmeg on my coffee or whathaveyou to pair with it.
I recently discovered you can toss up a flour + baking soda + water (+ salt) batter and cook it in the microwave in a minute. The sponge texture is perfect for dipping in olive oil.
My Pancake Batter:
3 large chicken eggs
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup sugar (add less if you don't want it so sweet but there will be less caramelising)
Mix well until it's all thoroughly homogeneous. Cook on a flat pan using the 1/2 cup size.
Bonus: put the pancake batter in a baking pan, add sliced fruit and it's now a clafoutis.
I'm a fan of the Dutch pancake, fluffy and oven-baked. I'm assuming they use baking powder for the fluffiness. The place I used to frequent when in Amsterdam has long gone but my heavens, they made an amazing banana baked pancake, with powdered sugar and genuine maple syrup.
If it's a "Dutch baby" pancake, they're baked in frying pan. But they only thing Dutch about them is the name. They are, in fact, an American invention.
Funny; most Dutchmen won't know what is meant by a 'Dutch pancake' baked in an oven. There is indeed nothing Dutch about it. Pancakes here are similar to the British ones; thicker than crêpes, not fluffy like American pancakes. Pancakes are still a popular treat for children, and a good authentic pancake restaurant is certainly not the worst place you can end up in.
(The crêpes you can buy with Nutella on it every 50m in tourist traps¹ are only for money laundering and foreign tourists still struggling to get a grip on Euro conversion rates.)
1: A good deal of Amsterdam's historic city centre.
In Britain: pancakes don't use baking powder. They're flat like a slighly thicker crepe.
I would describe a thick fluffy pancake made with baking powder as a "Scotch pancake", but in Australia, the USA, Canada and New Zealand, that style is just a "pancake".
I'm sympathetic to the confusion, despite having a British origin myself, just because the thick-fluffy pancake is objectively more similar to other things we call "cake".
Hmm. Maybe it’s regional? I spent years of my life finding all the best pancakes and French Toast of Auckland cafes and they all (at least aspired) to be thick and fluffy- unless they were intentionally crepes which are also very common.
The outlier I remember being when McDonalds started doing breakfast and they offered pancakes - I think I got them once when I had a super early flight at the airport and they were almost inedible- thin and rubbery! Easily the worst pancakes I’ve had in my life.
I never liked McDonald’s… hotcakes? I don’t recall them calling them pancakes. I believe they called them hotcakes. But yes rubber!
But I didn’t know what a thick American pancakes was until I moved to Australia mid 2000s. In NZ if I got them in a cafe they were like max 5-6mm in height. But always soft and fluffy.
But when I got to Australia and had American style they were always very thick. And it clogs the mouth. I don’t know how to explain it, but it requires me to have a drink while I eat them because there’s so much… cake… every Kiwi I knew in Australia also hated them.
John Locke was British, and in England we generally call crepe's pancakes (or at least, they are much more similar to a crepe, for instance on pancake day/shrove tuesday we will eat a thin pancake rather than an american-style pancake).
What American's call a pancake would be an 'American pancake' over here.
Crepes are mostly the same general idea as pancakes without raising agents; this recipe doesn't contain baking powder because it hadn't been invented yet.
Food evolution is quite interesting. Most recipes we consider traditional standardized maybe 50-100 years ago. A pretty good example of how far a recipe can evolve is how mincemeat pies evolved from containing mostly meat, some fruit, and spices in the 11th century, to the modern incarnation which has no meat and is just fruit and spices.
Bear in mind that you're reading a recipe written by John Locke, an English philosopher. So he's using the English definition of "pancake", which is nothing like the American definition.
He wrote it before 01694. Most of the English settlers who would define the American dialect of English hadn't moved to America yet in 01694, so there is no particular reason to expect Locke's definition to be more similar to the modern English definition than to the modern American definition. (And Nicosia claims that the result was in fact in between, even though she didn't beat it for the full 15 minutes.)
I can kind of understand it if you develop a database schema. But I don't see the point for regular text. No constraints exist, you can write whatever numbers you want.
Long now philosophy is that writing years that way encourages you to think about history on a different scale. To consider the date now as being near the beginning of a long future of history, rather than as at the end of a long line of history. Or, when looking at a historical date like 01694 to realize it’s not so very far from 02022.
It's the leading zero that throws me off and makes me look for a day-of-month or month number in a string that is too short to have one and a leading zero. ISO 8601 dates are fine.
ISO 8601 dates are perfect! It's too bad they're not more popular.
I tried to push for them in labels used in a manufacturing plant with locations both in the U.S. and Ireland. Seems like a slam dunk because it eliminates the confusion about whether the month or day comes first. In the end I had to compromise on the month specified by abbreviation rather than number: 2022-Jan-30.
I'm Swedish, and I can confirm that all my Swedish cookbooks contain recipes for "pancakes", "crepes" and "American pancakes", which are definitely 3 different things, and a Swedish "pancake" is a lot like you describe it.
I also have a recipe for what my cookbook calls Danish pancakes, or "æbleskiver" in Danish. Those are more like small round doughnuts prepared in a special frying pan. I'm not sure if the Danish would consider those "pancakes" though.
To further complicate the pancake taxonomy there is also the curiosity of “plättar”. Very small pancakes made in a special frying pan for more festive occasions. Not sure about their origin, but they are very common in Småland in the south of Sweden.
As a child we'd often have rice porridge one day, and if there were leftovers we'd have rislapper a day or two later.
You can make it in a regular pan, as the mix is thick enough it'll stay together, so just make them small.
(I strongly object, however, to the use of sour cream, jam and pistachio's to serve with them, and wonder what they'd been smoking - I prefer butter and a sprinkling of sugar)
Swedish cookery geek who loves visiting the Netherlands: poffertjes have depth, the pan has deep round-bottomed indents to hold batter. Swedish plättar are also made in a special pan (typically cast iron and from someone's granny) but the indents are circular and low, just maybe 3 mm deep. Lucky this is right after breakfast or I would be hungry now.
I don't know how they were made tradionally, but today as you say æbleskiver (apple disks) are not flat, they are spherical. That is why you need the special pan. Also, today most people don't put apple pieces inside them, instead eat them with some kind of jam, strawberry or raspberry.
Pancake seems to be reserved for flat things, so yeah æbleskiver would not be considered pancakes.
My version of them are as follows, from start to finished meal in 15 minutes with two good crepe pans.
This is per person, so for two people you double it, except for the extra egg.
1 egg (plus one extra)
2 decilitre (dl) of milk, roughly two cups
1 dl of flower
1 pinch of salt
1 tablespoon of sugar
1/2 dl of olive oil
Lots of butter to fry in
Mix eggs and half the milk. Add the flower, salt and sugar and mix until it is a smooth batter. Add the remaining milk and oil. Mix until smooth. Fry in butter, about a teaspoon, on a hot pan (7/10) until dry on top, flip over, for 30 sec. Done.
Serve with sweet jam, whipped cream, or butter and sugar, icecream. Go to town, enjoy.
Locke also has great educational advice. For learning Latin, he claims that beating children isn't effective. (No wonder no one learns Latin any more) He proposes books that interleave between the latin and the English. Neat idea.
Very interesting! Quite amusing that adding milk seems to be an unquestionable truth while adding sugar is considered destroying the flavour and adding pepper (which is not uncommon in India) appears to be unthinkable.
But I find it most surprising that the detailed rules say nothing about how long to steep the tea.
This recipe is 2:2:3 flour to butter to heavy cream! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pancakes recipe with this much fat. Was this typical for British cooking at the time?
I wish I could dig up the original quote, but I loved a story from a cookbook owned by Martha Washington, for eggs poached in butter. Paraphrased: "The profligate French use four pounds of butter, but we frugal Americans use only one pound of butter."
They ate a lot of fat, when they could get it. The sort of people who couldn't get it also didn't write cookbooks. Or use so much of an expensive imported spice.
I'll take the snide comment at face value. Yes. Besides, you should hear what the American upper middle class thinks of your country's cuisine, wherever you're from, unless it happens to be trendy this week. I'm not a big fan of pancakes from mix either.
America's Test Kitchen had a recipe for blueberry pancakes a number of years ago that I thought was pretty good. You can omit the blueberries of course if you want.
If you're an adult, you don't eat pancakes all the time (you probably shouldn't), you don't pour a sea of syrup onto your pancakes, and you aren't watching every penny, you owe it to yourself to buy real maple syrup. Real butter, too, for that matter.
That said, the corn syrup used as a base for cheap pancake syrup is regular corn syrup, not high fructose, though they are frequently today, not always, sweetened with HFCS. The brand I liked as a kid, Log cabin, has no HFCS. I just looked it up. Back in the wayback machine, old-timers would eat pancakes with Karo syrup, which is plain corn syrup sometimes with vanilla flavoring or molasses added. Some parts of the country, people would eat molasses on pancakes. Probably still do. These habits predate the invention of HFCS, let alone its use in food.
When I make a batch of pancakes, I always make the first one about 1/3 size as a test to make sure I have the heat correct. Then I eat it straight, no toppings. The rest get syrup.
"As to food, his breakfast was chiefly of honey; at dinner he used bread made of millet, barley or herbs, raw and boiled. Only rarely did he eat the flesh of victims; nor did he take this from every part of the anatomy. When he intended to sojourn in the sanctuaries of the divinities, he would eat no more than was necessary to still hunger and thirst. To quiet hunger, he made a mixture of poppy seed and sesame, the skin of a sea-onion, well washed, till entirely drained of the outward juice; of the flower of the daffodil, and the leaves of mallows, of paste of barley and pea; taking an equal weight of which, and chopping it small, with Hymettian honey he made it into mass. Against thirst he took the seed of cucumbers, and the best dried raisins, extracting the seeds, and the flower of coriander, and the seeds of mallows, purselain, scraped cheese, meal and cream; these he made up with wild honey."
Well, that's interesting. That wasn't in my textbooks.
It certainly makes Locke seem a bit more human.
BTW, I've had a bee in my bonnet for years over examples like this. So much stuff is edited out from what we are taught. Sure, this is trite and somewhat useless example but so often this is not the case.
Another example is documentary footage: almost daily, one sees a tiny snippet of a scene cut of some important news or historical event which disappears within a second before one's taken the scene in. Why bother showing it if the scene is incomprehensible?
What makes this so annoying is that we all know there's more footage as cameramen don't shoot scenes like that (they let the camera run as long as possibke). Unfortunately, the ordinary punter never gets to see the stuff that's left on the cutting room floor.
Much of history is taught on the Great Man Theory, which focuses on individuals doing important things. Their humanity, as well as the contribution of anybody else, is ignored in favor of a simpler narrative of history as a series of great events.
Historians are increasingly looking at history as a fuller story, but that hasn't really trickled down to schools yet. It might engage students more, but it is harder to quiz and isn't seen as inspiring patriotism.
The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
My take on it is that it was an intentional misspelling intended to describe the "armchair philosopher" that arises from many of us when we use THC products.
I could be wrong but it makes me chuckle every time I think of it.
Don't ever say this, because you really don't know when someone will come along and invent baking powder. It basically obsoleted every recipe the way Dreadnought obsoleted every Navy.
1. https://www.youtube.com/user/jastownsendandson
2. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4e4wpjna1vx3DFU7r7gj...