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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]

1. https://www.youtube.com/user/jastownsendandson

2. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4e4wpjna1vx3DFU7r7gj...

Tasting History with Max Miller is good too! https://www.youtube.com/c/TastingHistory/videos
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
I love pancakes, crepes, etc. If you have a ripe banana available, I'm a fan of this 4-ingredient banana/oats pancake recipe. Blend the following:

    Ripe banana.
    2 Eggs.
    1/3 cup instant oats.
    1/2 teaspoon baking powder.
Low heat. Cooke 3 minutes. Flip. Cook one minute. That's it.

Here's what mine looked like https://xenodium.com/banana-oats-pancakes-recipe

Nice. I'll try this, thanks.

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.

Any way. Thanks again.

Arguably that's an (remarkably homogeneously consisted) omelette?
Surprise. Never expect to see a receipt and banana pancake in this web site. So far away from lisp.

Universe nature is emptiness. There is no permanence. Really.

Upvoted for the subtle and relevant use of “cooke”.
Finally, a good reason to have a couple paragraphs before the recipe!
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.

https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/member/views/joy-of-cooki...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/technology/jeff-bezos-ama...

Speaking of old pancake recipes and the Times, I’m very fond of the NYT 1966 Dutch Baby recipe. It’s said to be Amanda Hesser’s favourite recipe.

https://mobile.twitter.com/i/web/status/1477263398303932420

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.

I thought he was more into space cake ...
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.
Why would he beat the batter for 15 minutes? Did flour back then not have as much gluten?

This is all the info I could manage to find about this on my own: (mangled the link since the site is jam-packed with ads and trackers)

www.realsimple (dot) com (slash) food-recipes/cooking-tips-techniques/pancake-secret-ingredient-gluten

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.
Flour was not milled as finely or consistently so more mixing was required and gluten development was not as much of a concern.
The recipe has 1.5 cups heavy cream, which will become fluffy when you beat it that long, making the pancakes lighter and fluffier.
Fun fact: nutmeg is toxic to humans in surprisingly small amounts. I wouldn't eat half a nutmeg by myself in one sitting!
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.
Cue this chart showing how close the ratio of fetal dose to effective dose of nutmeg is (spoiler it’s bad).

https://trevoroldak.com/uploads/drugdoses.jpg

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 wouldn't eat this whole recipe - half a pound of butter, 7 egg yolks, 3/4 pint of heavy cream etc - in one sitting either, even without the nutmeg.
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.
Nostradamus also wrote recipes for jams, etc.

https://botchedandecstatic.tumblr.com/post/8954281467/nostra...

You can subst orange blossom water for Cointreau or Grand Marnier.

In fact try adding these into regular crepe, pancake or French toast batter. A tablespoon or so adds an absolutely wonderful nuance to the result.

Antidepressant-level nutmeg in those pancakes.
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.
Looks more like a crepe than a pancake.
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.
George Orwell on the perfect cup of tea may also be of interest: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
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?
"Melt it to oyle, & take off the skum"

Ghee!

From the looks of that recipe, those sound more like a rich dessert than a breakfast pancake to me!
For any americans here: With the right recipe, are your pancakes edible without simply using them as sponges for high fructose corn syrup?

I'm thinking of the ones with baking powder, that I consider "american pancakes" (but correct me if that's not right).

Pythagorean Pancakes

3:2:1 ratio. 3 eggs, 2 cups of milk and 1 cup flour. No beans.

It seems heavy on liquid, but it makes lovely, flat crepes.

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.

For pancakes I only use half a banana (mashed) and 3 eggs.
That’s a lot of nutmeg. I’d definitely put less.
I can confirm- this recipe is dank
Was this some kind of lost recipe?
"John Locke was right about almost everything."
Slightly off-topic, this reminds me of one of the most-clever band names ever: "Francis Bakin".
This is the right way

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.