In last week's post on the chocolate dessert Mohr im Hemd, I mentioned the peculiar Austrian or Catholic convention of eating dessert for dinner on meat-free fast days. Another sweet dish that falls into that particular family of desserts masquerading as meals is Palatschinken. Indeed, I have an extremely specific memory of being in Cafe Landtmann on the Ringstrasse late one evening and seeing a Burgtheater patron of some years sitting down after a show and ordering a plate of Palatschinken -- thin pancakes akin to English-style pancakes or French crepes, lined with apricot marmalade, rolled, served two or three to a plate and perhaps finished with a dusting of icing sugar. If the play she saw that night was as long as those that I have sat through at the Burg, she must have been starving.
Perhaps a note on the name. In Germany, pancakes are called, literally, Pfannkuchen -- which is, confusingly, also the word for a jam-filled doughnut. Austria, of course, has to be different and the name Palatschinken derives, first, from the Latin placenta, which simply means 'cake,' and then from the languages of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire: placinta in Romanian, palatsinta in Hungarian, and palatsinka in assorted Slavic languages. Palatschinken as a name or word first begins to appear in Viennese cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth-century. Prior, Palatschinken were often called Amaletten oder Amuletten, deriving from the outdated French term alumelle, from which we get the contemporary word omelette. Indeed, in Vienna it is still possible to find a sweet dish called an Omlett, which is essentially a thick pancake made from Kaiserschmarrn batter -- in other words, it's Kaiserschmarrn before it becomes Kaiserschmarrn.
