Pancake Legacy

These lazy mornings at the cottage begin with a strip of pink on my bedroom wall, a slice of sunrise squeezing through the blind and the window sill. When the pink softens to a yellow glow, I get out of bed and press the ‘brew’ button on the coffee maker. Someone always grinds the coffee the night before; the sharp whirr of the machine is too much for this quiet, tender hour. I wipe the dew off the chairs on the deck, then pour my first cup. 

When the sun is almost above us, the kids roll out of bed and create privacy walls on the kitchen table with cereal boxes. Vector, Cheerios and a small box of Alpen sit between them like study carrels, only their iPhones are propped up and airpods are in their ears. How did this happen?

If we slipped back in time, to when I was on the edge of teenagehood, I’d be sitting at this table wearing Cotton Ginny, hair salty from the day before, eating pancakes. Pancakes were for mornings like this. They were built into the feel of this place, the speed, and the morning chill before the heat of the day. 

But it takes someone to make them. My mom set the tone and created that ritual. It takes effort to meld food into the feel of a place. 

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My grandfather was a salesman, specializing in copper pots. My mother owned a whole set, including a large, copper frypan that hung on our floral wallpapered kitchen to the left of the stove. When I was a kid, that pan came down every Saturday morning for pancakes. It wasn’t an easy pan; I imagine it required a bi-annual seasoning of baking soda and vinegar, followed by a good slick of vegetable oil to maintain a non-stick surface. But there wasn’t time for that in our household of six. Instead the pancakes would burn a little on its hot, dry surface, and when we smelled the batter lightly smoking, we would break away from Saturday morning cartoons and spill into the kitchen. 

There were never enough pancakes. Having three sisters created a sense of scarcity. I ate quickly, efficiently, so I could get seconds, thirds. Syrup was Aunt Jemima. We lived in the land of sugar maples, but the real thing was expensive and my mother was frugal. On the mornings we didn’t have any syrup, she would improvise the way her father did by whisking brown sugar with boiling water and a touch of butter. We didn’t like that. 

My world expanded when I started sleeping over at my friend Jennifer’s house. Her mother made pancakes one at a time in a cast-iron pan, always sizzling butter with a touch of vegetable oil to keep them from burning. The effect was a thick pancake with a perfect ring of crispiness around the edge, and as soon as she slid it onto my plate, she’d make another. 

When we stayed at Jennifer’s father’s house, he would bring home pancakes from the McDonald’s drive-thru. We were allowed to eat them in front of his big wooden television set, right there on the carpet. The syrup sunk into the squishy pancakes. Sometimes my plastic knife would slice right through the styrofoam container. Each bite was spongy and sweet, so different from the crispy yet fluffy sweetness of the pancakes at Jennifer’s mother’s house, or the familiarity of pancakes at my house. But I liked the discrepancy of styles. Pancakes met the mood of the place. 

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I gave up on pancakes for a long time. It might have been something to do with my aging midriff that resembled soft pancakes in places. Or maybe it started long before that, back when I went to San Francisco for an internship at a food magazine.

The internship began in late fall when the persimmon trees of Menlo Park were heavy with fruit. The wheels of my borrowed Ford Escort squashed the fallen fruit, splatting juice and seeds into the street. I had never seen a persimmon before. I hadn’t been in a Mexican grocery filled only with rows of chili peppers either, or crossed eight lanes of dense traffic while listening to Howard Stern discuss fellatio on the radio. Interning in the test kitchen at Sunset Magazine in your early twenties can crack a person open.

I stayed with my cousin Claire and her husband Dave in Noe Valley, a forty-minute commute from Sunset. They turned their one bedroom apartment into two by pulling the sofa into the hallway and setting up a futon in the living room, where the sofa used to be. We watched the 49ers in the hallway with pizza on our laps. We woke up and sipped coffee in the gray light of the kitchen. I asked Dave when the sun would come out. April, he said. I slipped into the slacks I borrowed from my roommate back home then set off through the fog to work.

One night Dave’s friend dropped in. As we worked through fat burritos and beer in the kitchen,  he told me about his life in Taos where he was building an adobe home. He loved the ancient legacy of these structures and their energy efficiency. He was also drawn to the tactile beauty of making a home with his own hands, in his own vernacular, using sand and piled earth.

I was twenty-four. I hadn’t thought much about architecture or building materials, or the specific heat in my burrito subdued by the crispness of the beer. But I knew how I wanted to feel inside a home. A cedar-shingled Cape Cod came to mind, with a centre hall plan, tall windows on either side of the door, and a brick chimney that stretched prominently through the centre of the roof. I imagined hours by the fire, wrapped in mohair, sipping something warming. 

“A Cape Cod?” He asked. “You must like pancakes. Plain, and anyone can make them.” 

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Anyone can make pancakes. It’s the doing that’s important. 

I have a pint of strawberries that need eating (2 cups), as ripe and heavy as the persimmons in Menlo Park. I tip them into the blender along with a juicy, bruised peach. I add a few tablespoons of icing sugar (4, give or take) and fresh lemon juice (2 tablespoons). It is the less decadent version of a rich sauce we like to pour over cake (thank you Sheherazade), but this version works beautifully, lasts in the fridge for several days, and is the perfect way to use up overripe strawberries. I blitz it all together and put it in a jug on the table, along with the maple syrup. 

I make pancakes from memory. This recipe is more or less the idea. They burn a little, they smoke. I add more butter, a little oil, and the next batch gets better. I sing out, pancakes! the way my younger self would have liked. The boys stumble into the light, surprised, and take out their airpods.

If you’re in the mood for past newsletters, all the oldies can be found over here.