The giant pancake that feeds everyone

With Shrove Tuesday upon us, I am forced to face my annual pancake day gripe. It is, inevitably, the cook’s gripe: standard crèpe-like pancakes should be eaten as soon as they are cooked, each doled out to waiting mouths as soon as it’s ready. Yes, recipes tell you you can keep them warm in a low oven, but doing that tends them towards the rubbery and luke-warm. This means that the cook is standing at the stove ladling batter while everyone else eats. As a greedy cook, I resent this. But there is a pancake solution: the Dutch baby.

The name does not point to a Holland heritage: instead, the dish is named after the Pennsylvanian Dutch, a group of German-speaking immigrants to America. The Dutch baby is made with a similar batter to normal pancakes, but is baked in the oven, and one recipe stands as an entire meal for two hungry people or, with generous toppings, up to four. Like a yorkshire pudding or a toad in the hole, the batter goes into a screamingly hot pan, and then straight into a hot oven where it billows and balloons. Once out of the oven, the centre will drop, but the sides should remain tall, creating the perfect bowl for whichever filling your heart desires. Serve in the pan, and encourage diners to dig in together.

The batter contains no chemical leavening, and swirling the butter in the base of the pan, where it melts and fizzes and foams, before adding the thin batter, and shoving into the oven, it’s hard to believe that the mixture could do anything other than form a rubbery layer on the bottom of the pan. And yet, twenty minutes later, it is a sight to behold. Overcome by silliness when it came out of the oven, I topped it with sliced banana and salted caramel and a frilly layer of squirty cream.