This recipe is based on one from a wonderful old cookery book called Adam’s Luxury and Eve’s Cookery. Published in 1744, it is the earliest book I’ve seen which is largely vegetarian. The first half (Adam’s) is devoted to kitchen gardening, and the second (Eve’s) to recipes. It wasn’t a feminist era.
I have a facsimile edition from Prospect Books, founded by the late Alan Davidson and his wife in 1979. They specialise in cookery and food history and in addition to publishing new titles, they breathe new life into out-of-print books. You can probably tell I’m a fan.
Anyway, let me tempt you. The first recipe in the book is one for ‘Apple Pancakes, or Fritters’. This is not a pancake as we would understand it today – no flour – it’s perhaps closer to a clafoutis, or what a later recipe in the book calls a tansey. The quantities given are colossal: ‘beat up 20 eggs in a quart of cream,’ we’re told.
I’ve faffed about with it, with lots of long-distance help from my friend Steph Clubb, and after numerous tries have come up with something you might enjoy if you’d like to change things up a bit on Pancake Day – or any day.
It’s very light, in spite of the ingredients and the frying, but if you don’t like sweet eggy things you may want to look elsewhere for inspiration. I have to put this disclaimer in because, to be honest, my husband loathed it. He’d never have got kicked out of the Garden of Eden.
If you’d like to make it less brown, take a leaf out of our ancestors’ cookery books and strew it with primroses. Ah, the primrose path. Where’s that snake?
Eve's Apple Pancake
Ingredients:
2 sharp eating apples, peeled, cored and thickly sliced
1 tbsp sugar (granulated, caster, soft brown, doesn’t matter)
1 generous tbsp butter
2 eggs, separated
60ml double cream
1 tbsp icing sugar
1/4 tspn ground nutmeg
1/4 tspn ground ginger
1/4 – 1/2 tspn ground cinnamon
Extra sugar and rosewater, to sprinkle
Method:
Pre-heat the grill to medium high.
In one bowl, whisk the eggs yolks with the cream and icing sugar until blended. In a second bowl, beat the egg whites to soft peaks. Seat aside.
Put an omelette pan on a moderate heat on the stove and add the butter. When it’s foaming,spread the apple slices in a single layer and cook, turning occasionally, until tinged with brown. Sprinkle over the spices, stir to coat and cook for a minute or two more.
Using a metal spoon, combine the egg whites with the egg yolk mixture, folding in lightly so as not to knock out the air but making sure they are thoroughly mixed.
Pour this over the apples, so that they are covered in a foamy blanket. Continue to cook on a low to moderate heat, until when you gently lift the side of the pancake with a spatula you can see the base is golden brown and the eggs are beginning to set, with any runniness confined to the middle. It’s difficult to be precise on timings as your cooker is likely different to mine, but reckon on six to eight minutes.
Put the pan under the grill (not too close) and brown the top. It will souffle as you do this. Once it’s cooked to your satisfaction, remove from the grill. This is your chance to show everyone how well it’s puffed up, because like a souffle it will sink back a bit and it needs a few minutes to cool and set.
Ease the sides away from the pan with a palette knife and using oven gloves, invert it by clapping a plate on top and turning it all over. You can skip this bit if you find it alarming and eat it straight from the pan.
Sprinkle with sugar – I like the crunch of demerara – and with a little rosewater. Orange flower water would be a good alternative, but don’t go mad or it’ll taste like soap. You might like to serve extra cream on the side.
Looks lovely. Linda!
Thank you – always fun to experiment with old recipes. Lx
Lovely. It’s hard to mess up fried, spiced apples. These look delightful and have me plotting a pancake day treat.
Thanks, Conor, glad you like it. Lx
Cooking from a recipe some 250 years old! Absolutely fabulous . . . just have to try this ‘apple omelette’ with delightful spicing and but few sins spread around . . . yum . . . tomorrow 🙂 !
So much to love here. I adore old cookbooks, too. And that’s really old! It sounds delicious to me, and very much like an apple clafoutis recipe I make (though mine has flour in it).
Thanks, Michelle. It’s a lovely old book, still available second-hand. I think if I made this again I might put some flour in it, but I wanted to stick as close to the original recipe as I could, although the eggs weren’t originally separated. Have a great weekend. Lx
this looks delicious linda. i have done a course on food history and i remember that they said eggs back in those days were about half the size of current day ones, so you always need to halve the amount in recipes. i guess we have super-sized our chooks (chickens) these days. cheers sherry
Thanks, Sherry! Yes, I’ve heard that too and I took it into account when revamping the recipe. I messed around with various proportions of yolk to white but decided this worked best. Be interested to hear what you think if you try it! Best, Linda.