Pancake Week – Hand-Written Recipe

In response to the “Write Now… Yes, Right Now!” challenge from PhoTrabloggeer and inspired by Amy from The World is a Book.

One of my most valued possessions is a very old recipe book. It’s an old notebook, a calendar diary of 1966, to be exact, with yellow pages and torn cover. It’s filled with recipes, most of which are pre-1917 recipes of marvelous cakes, French pastries, various types of dough and jams. The bulk of the recipes, however, are not written on the pages of the notebook, but tucked in- between. The recipes from before the Revolution of 1917 are my great-grandmother’s and those that “native” to the 1966 notebook are my grandmother’s. Today I have added one of my own.

Pancake Week on my mind, I added a favorite recipe for pancakes, Russian style, but with no yeast.

    And here are two recipes of pancakes written by my grandmother. Both are Russian style pancakes, i.e. the size of the frying pan, soft, flexible, easy to wrap around any kind of stuffing, be it mushrooms, ground meat or cherries. The difference between the two recipes is that the first is the traditional kind, “sour” as my gran used to say, made with yeast, while the second, at the bottom, is the easier, modern way to cook the same pancakes substituting yeast with baking soda.

The language is Russian throughout the notebook.