Pikelets

Makes 5 servings of 3 pancakes each (serving a crowd?)

1 cup milk
1½ cups water
1 teaspoon dried yeast
3½ cups (a little under 1 lb) unbleached flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
2 eggs, beaten
at least 2½ Tablespoons butter for topping

Special equipment

a planc would be nice

Method

Warm the milk and water in a broad shallow bowl. Dissolve in the yeast. Stir together the flour, salt and sugar. Make a well in the center and pour in the yeast mixture and the beaten eggs. Beat briskly with a whisk until smooth. Leave it in a warm place for an hour, or a cool place for a few hours if you want to delay the cooking until later.

Whisk down the batter. Lightly oil and heat your planc, griddle, or large frying pan. Pour ladlefuls (about ½ cup of batter) onto the surface and cook at a moderate heat. Flip when holes form and the surface loses its glaze. Serve stacked with melted butter. Makes about 15 six-inch pancakes.

Notes

Technically this is Bara pyglyd ‘pitchy bread’ not pikelets: simple Welsh pancakes, very similar to the dish called crempog (buckwheat pancakes, known as krampoch over in Less Britain), except for the flour and some extra butter in the batter. They travelled eastward into the Midlands and became pikelets. The Anglicised version of the dish usually lacks the eggs. In other words, flat crumpets. David's recipe is exactly that: watered-down crumpet batter, baked flat on the griddle without the confining ring. See also her discussion of the size of the cake.

The planc is a basic Welsh cooking utensil: a round, flat baking iron for cooking oatcakes and other griddle breads. Luard asserts that some had tripod feet for placing over the fire, others arched handles for hanging above the fire, and some had a mere loop handle for placing over the coals: a rimless frying pan (illustration available, 7k gif). In the immigrant Welsh populations of the U.S., they've now been widely replaced by the electric frypan, alas.

First served: Beltane 1993
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Last modified: © July 1995