How to make the perfect apfelschmarrn – recipe | Felicity Cloake's how to cook the perfect …

This fruity central European pancake dish can be served as part of a main course or as a dessert. Our resident perfektionistin flips through a selection of the best recipes Schmarr n , or schmarren , Anja Dunk writes, is “peasant food at its best: filling, simple and comforting”.

The usual English translation, pancake , a dish we generally associate with delicate desserts is, I think, somewhat misleading; schmarren, as it’s also spelled, bears very little resemblance to a thin, lacy crepe, and instead sits somewhere between our own plump, rich Shrove Tuesday numbers and a batter pudding . Indeed, you’ll find it on the sweets section of restaurant and cafe menus, but in Germany, Dunk reports in her book Strudel, Noodles and Dumplings , it “passes as a main meal, not dessert, because it is very filling and not particularly sweet in flavour”, and also, I suspect, because “it takes 10 minutes to make from start to finish” and is therefore a brilliantly quick supper. (“Quite frankly,” she adds,” as a mother, I find this recipe a godsend. ”) Austro-Hungarian in origin, it’s eaten in both Germany and…