Column, Published March 2008
Three eggs. One cup
milk. One cup flour. Two tablespoons sugar. One teaspoon baking powder
(optional). That’s it. That – my family’s pancake recipe – has been a mantra
since I was old enough to wake up early and get out a bowl, measuring cups, and
a wooden spoon. Those five – sometimes four – ingredients were the ones that
went together to make our Sunday-morning pancakes (a minor peacekeeping) when I
was a (majorly cranky) teenager. Then, when I moved to New York, they were at
the center of my friends’ Sunday-morning brunches, my way of plying attention
from a six-year-old, my first step towards dinner parties. Those pancakes, the
only recipe I cant remember ever not knowing, are the lens through which I can
look at my entire biography.
My first clear memory of
making pancakes takes place in Edmonton, Canada, in the house in which I
learned to bake. I would wake up early Sunday mornings, slip down to our
kitchen, and break out the eggs, flour, milk, sugar, and baking powder. There
were a few missteps: the time my mantra went wrong in my head and I substituted
a cup of sugar for the two tablespoons, reversing the amount of flour; or the
time I put in two tablespoons of baking powder. The first mistake we
overlooked; the second we, well, threw away.
We would come together
Sunday mornings. I remember my mother sometimes taking a little jar of bacon
grease form the fridge, frying them in that, and I remember taste-testing
different additions. I remember going to friends’ houses and trying out their
mom’s pancakes, made from mixes and eaten with Aunt Jemima, something I found
at once beyond exotic and completely gross. I remember learning to let the bowl
stand on the counter for 15 or 20 minutes, or sometimes even an hour, while I
waited for my parents to get up and the batter to rest. I remember learning
never to whisk the lumps out but instead to leave them in, to relish the
texture they would melt into once cooked.
I stopped making the
pancakes when I left home, and didn’t make them for another six years, years
spent in boarding school (where pancake making would have taken time from our
rigorous pint- and cigarette-sneaking) and college (where we were fed). I soon
fell in love with a boy and we moved in together with two other boys in a
slanty floored New York apartment on the Upper East Side. And because a group
of us had graduated together and moved to New York together and were, at the
time, clinging to each other for dear life and dearer memories, we instituted a
standing Sunday brunch. The locations changed – the East Village, the Upper
East Side at our place, the Upper East Side down the block – but it was the
first time I’d made the pancakes since I had become some semblance of an adult.
I still remembered the recipe, but it took a second to kick-star my memory. It
was like recalling the beginning o a poem you know you know by heart but that
just needs that one little prompt, one tiny start. I realized I had to begin
with the eggs.
One of the other boys I
lived with had his own recipe for pancakes, and given that we were already
fighting a full-blown cold roommate war (long since over), all of our tension
came through our arguments-through-action over our respective pancakes. It was
by making pancakes that I learned that I’m much more likely to be passive-aggressively
controlling than aggressively forthcoming. It was by making pancakes with hi
and sometimes against him that I first recognized in myself a particular tone
of voice, one I had inherited from my mother who would say if we were doing
something wrong, “Surely you’re not…?” He was a whisker, and fried them in oil.
I was a stirrer, and cooked them in butter. He might have won the first few
times, but the shock with which our friends looked at me in the kitchen wearing
an apron was an unparalleled thrill. Seeing people happily eating something I
had cooked grew into a love of entertaining, and visually making pancakes was
what planted the seed for eight-person dinner parties four years and many
neighborhoods later.
Several years after
discovering the pleasure of cooking for others I was living with another boy,
this time in Brooklyn. For convoluted reasons I discovered a vested interest in
the approval of a six-year-old. I had no idea how to begin, but remembering the
development of my own relationship with my brother’s father, my stepfather who
taught me how to cook, I thought that I would start in the kitchen. So, one
Sunday morning, I made pancakes. The six-year-old, a beyond-picky eater, ate
the first one. He might even have said it was good. That thrill of hosting my
peers on the Upper East Side was nothing compared to this thrall of acceptance.
And then, a week later, he woke up one Thursday and asked me to make him a
pancake. I was shocked: a weekend breakfast on a weekday? But I agreed, and for
the first time altered the recipe, dividing my mantra into thirds, and then
gradually, we started talking about why they came out the way they did, the way
the butter ran into the rivulets in the batter as the pancakes cooked, the
denseness they took on when I left out the baking powder. We moved on to cakes
and cookies and brads, then peas and fish and soup. Even though I don’t live
there anymore, don’t make pancakes for him anymore, I like to think that they
might be to him what they were to me: an introduction to the fact that anything
you cook, anything you bake, anything you throw together by mixing things as
basic as eggs, milk, flour, sugar, and baking powder (optional) is, every time,
so very much more than what it seems.
So. What’s your recipe?
