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I like Dutch pancakes and French crêpes a lot. The American style thick pancake is not my thing.
That said, it seems this recipe results in a Dutch style pancake, so I would like to try to prepare it sometime.
When I make pancakes, I usually just use:
- eggs
- flour
- whole milk + water in equal amounts
- cinnamon to taste
- little bit of vanilla extract
- some sugar and salt
The resulting mixture should be slightly thick.
Using whole butter to prevent the mixture from sticking to the pan.
When smoke starts appearing around the pancake, it’s time to turn the pancake around in the pan. Should be baked on medium size fire.
For every pancake add a little butter to the pan, wait for it to melt. For first pancake use more butter.
I love this simple recipe.
We call it a Dutch Baby in this house. Not sure why, or where the recipe came from, but i make this every Saturday for my daughter:
Cast iron into a 425° oven as it preheats.
While you're waiting: -whisk 4 eggs. -Add half cup of flour. -Half cup of milk (almond, oat, whole milk all work), warmed up to room temp. -Dash of salt
Whisk until smooth. When oven is ready, pull out cast iron, add 2 tbls of butter and make sure it gets all the sides. Pour in mixture and bake 12 minutes. Turns into a billowy beautiful eggy pancake. Good with maple syrup or savory with cheese and ham.
When my wife makes crepes, she mixes the recipe the night before in a jug. I don't know why (sorry!) but they turn out delicious and she swears this step is important. Lovely and thin, with a good consistency. I've also no idea if they are legit 'French crêpes'.
The recipe is:
- 1 cup of plain flour
- 1 large egg
- 1 1/3 cup milk (half milk half water usually too!)
- 2 tblspoons of melted butter
The first 3 are combined the night before and whizzed up, then left in the fridge. The melted butter you do on the morning of -- melt it in the pan then tip it into the other mixture and stir it a little. Having made it the night before is ideal if you're visiting a friend in the morning, too.
Your pan technique sounds identical to us : ) ... enjoy!
Letting the batter rest after mixing allows the flour to fully absorb the moisture and for the gluten to relax. Ends up with a better texture. No need to rest overnight as a single hour is enough time. However no one wants to wait an hour in the morning so they make the night before.
For the way me and my wife do thin pancakes, we avoid sugar, I think it makes the pancake stick more to the pan. Less milk is also better and we fry on olive or sunflower oil. And lately we've been using dinkel (spelt) flour instead of plain white flour. I sometimes put in some baking powder, but my wife avoids it.
> I like Dutch pancakes and French crêpes a lot. The American style thick pancake is not my thing.
Me too! I have a hard time finding a good crepe anywhere, even NYC.
Try telling someone in the US how good an onion and cheese pancake with mayo is for breakfast!
Thank you for the recipe!
Same, every sunday is pancake day in our house. It has to be normal butter. The smell, mixed with coffee, is amazing. But we just switched from gas to induction and I'm still dialling the process in again.
Try with buttermilk. The tartness does good things. If buttermilk is not readily available kefir can be used in a pinch.
As it is thinner than whole milk I would skip the water.
Change my mind: American pancakes are just waffles made in a pan.
smoke? or steam?
In order to get close to how these might have tasted in Locke's time, one shouldn't be using modern white flour which is a 19th century development. Using (stone-milled) whole wheat might come closer to how things were in the 17th century. (Also better for your glucose levels)
In Brittany they make pancakes with buckwheat flour, and they are absolutely delicious:
https://www.seriouseats.com/savory-buckwheat-crepes-galettes...
> (stone-milled) whole wheat
If you want it on the cheap, go purchase Atta at your local Indian convinence store. Similar for stone milled cornflour (I've found Hispanic store prices have been going up lately compared to Asian stores)
Drowned in butter and real maple syrup there is little difference in taste. You just have to adjust the hydration in the recipe.
They removed the bran, just not the germ. An equivalent today might be white flour with a little added wheat germ.
I believe John Locke spend much of his time between 1683-1689 in the Netherlands as he had fled England for being under suspicion of bad things.
As mentioned in another reply, this is indeed a Dutch pancake recipe. And the recipe does contain an 85 (or is 86?) in the top right corner. The addition of nutmeg, while very decadent, would have made sense when considering that Locke traveled between the cities of Holland, at that time the heart of the Dutch overseas trading empire. It spanned to such places as the island of Java, where you could pick the nutmeg right off of the tree.
I'm pretty sure the 85 in the corner is the folio number 85 given in the description "Oxford, Bodleian Libraries MSS. Locke c. 25, fol. 85.". I.e. its the page number.
On the other hand you may be right about the rest of what you write.
I tried following this recipe - it was tasty but very heavy and greasy. Perhaps philosophy and cooking do not require the same talents.
Yes, it seems like an insane amount of butter and heavy cream. Maybe butter in those days wasn't 80% fat and heavy cream wasn't 40%? Also, and it was covered by other commenters, but that amount of nutmeg, wow.
Reminded me of Sartre's Cookbook: https://pvspade.com/Sartre/cookbook.html
In 1621 The Dutch waged a bloody battle to secure control of the Banda Islands, which was for the west the only known source of Nutmeg, and prior to knowing the source Europe paid exorbitant prices for Nutmeg that came to Venice via Arab traders.
The colonial history of the Banda Islands is fascinating and terrible:
I've heard people speak of the book 'The Nutmeg's Curse', Ghosh, which dwells on the history here.
Mix your labor into the pancake batter and you will be the rightful owner of the pancakes.
How close or far is half a nutmeg from hallucination and death territory? Seems like an awful lot of nutmeg!
Edit: So I looked into this. A single nutmeg is 5-10 grams. That means the pancakes will have 2.5-5g between all of them. According to a reddit post (https://www.reddit.com/r/nutmeg/comments/nd5d9q/nutmeg_effec...), it seems like 5g of nutmeg could be enough for a trip, but it won't come even close to killing you.
So if you make this recipe and eat _all_ the pancakes yourself, you might go on a trip.
It may be that myristicin(the active compound in nutmeg) breaks down during cooking. Additionally myristicin is not very well absorbed, and the fact that it's mixed into food would likely reduce its absorption significantly.
Also, I just want to mention that tripping on nutmeg is not something I'd recommend to anyone. It may not kill you outright, but it will make you delirious enough that you're no longer aware of your surroundings, what you're doing, and you may end up harming or even killing yourself. It's a deliriant, not a psychedelic. You're also likely to get intense muscle aches that will make it thoroughly unenjoyable even in sub-hallucinogenic doses.
Apparently there have only been two recorded deaths from nutmeg. One was an eight year-old boy who consumed at least two whole nutmegs and the other a college student who consumed 4 tablespoons (28g) of powdered nutmeg.
Although there are cases of much much more nutmeg being consumed that were not lethal. There is one case in historical literature where a pregnant woman consumed 10-12 nutmegs (70-84g) to induce intoxication.
This leads me to hypothesise that perhaps historical nutmegs were smaller, or that they were grown in unoptimal conditions so produced less myristicin.
This is a lot of pancakes to eat by yourself. Just eyeballing the recipe it looks like you're looking at the order of about a kilo of pancakes at the end.
If you solo these I think the nutmeg is going to be the least of your worries.
https://www.healthline.com/health/high-on-nutmeg#warnings
LD50 seems to be on the order of grams per kg. Wild that 5g are enough for a psychoactive effect and that this recipe might in some cases be enough.
Related:
John Locke’s recipe for Pancakes (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30132612 - Jan 2022 (155 comments)
Very appropriate post for Shrove Tuesday !
Coming from a country where Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Tuesday) is not a thing, thank you for explaining to us what's happening :)
Pancake Tuesday it is in Ireland.
Strange (or should I say typical) that the author should give us an updated recipe that partly shows the weights in grams and then proceeds to use cups and tablespoons without specifying the actual volume.
Locke's original is more precise.
my pancakes aren't philosophically inclined, still here are my tips:
- you need to add in the flower gradually, sifting it through a sieve while stirring the milk.
- it helps to grate an apple and add that to the mixture, very recommended.
> Take sweet cream 3/4 + pint. Flower a
quarter of a pound. Eggs four 7 leave out two 4 of
the whites. Beat the Eggs very well. Then put in
the flower, beat it a quarter of an hower. Then
put in six spoonfulls of the Cream, beat it a litle
Take new sweet butter half a pound. Melt it to oyle, &
take off the skum, power in all the clear by degrees
beating it all the time.
As wonky as English orthography is, I'm still very glad it has been largely standardized.
I thought it was a recipe from John Locke for the TV series Lost.
I remember seeing this recipe a couple of years ago, but I still haven’t made them. They just seem so expensive and unhealthy compared to a regular crepes recipe.
7 eggs for a 100 grams of flour, usually it’s 1 egg per 100 g. There is double the butter to the flour, my crepes recipe has 10 g of butter to 330 g of flour. I just can’t justify the experiment. Maybe I will make a 1/7 portion, but I can’t see it working out.
If you havent seen this channel on YT; cowboy cooking:
https://www.youtube.com/@CowboyKentRollins/videos
Its really fn great.
The video on how to stock a chuck wagon was great. Its all outdoor cooking over fire - and there is so much great knowledge in these vids.
In the final photo, the pancakes appear to be somewhat dry and thick. This might be more characteristic of Slovenian or European styles, where we typically cook them until they're just lightly browned and thinner. :)
I made this a lot of times, it’s my favourite pancake recipe now - I go a bit easier on the eggs and butter but the nutmeg is the real trick!
"take off the skum". They totally forgot this step in the updated recipe. Now your pancakes will be full of scummy butter.
Didn't know "skum" used to be an English word, or that its meaning changed to what is scum today. In nordic languages it still just means foam.
This recipe looks most substantial, which is not what you'd expect.
What an enormous margin - presumably left intentionally, for later notes
This was more than a century before the invention of baking powder.
I prefer Chef Raymond Oliver's version
https://www.aboutahandful.com/crepes-oliver/
I, too, enjoy a nice, fluffy, social contract
We should be reading his Second Treatise on Civil Government not his pancake recipe.