Fun Food Facts and Fables by the Grumpy Gourmet
This
morning I cooked up some pancakes. I’m good at pancakes, but this morning I was
using some batter that I had prepared a couple of days ago and stored in the
refrigerator. My batter had thickened so I added a little milk (secret – never
put water into a pancake batter) and, of course, got it too thin.
There is an
old saying that the first pancake never turns out right. Well, I fried three of
them and none turned out right. They were the ugliest mishmash of pancakes you
have ever seen, but they were still delicious. As I may have said earlier, I’m
good at pancakes.
As I sat
there eating them I got to wondering how pancakes came to be and decided to
write the history of pancakes. If you have ever read anything I have written,
you are probably aware that I am not big on research so, of course, I didn’t
look anything up. I just went to my computer and started writing.
THE HISTORY OF
PANCAKES
Way back,
thirty or forty thousand years ago (apologies to any of you “Creationists” out
there), Alley Oop—wait, I’d best I change that, the name is probably still under
copyright. I will start over.
About
thirty or forty thousand years ago, a cave man named Biff was out with the gang
hunting for an Azendohsaurus. These beasts were big and had a lot of meat on
them. They were also rather stupid, very small brains for the size of them. And
they were pretty slow, easy prey for the hunters.
Unfortunately, there weren’t any around so Biff and the boys
had a bad day.
Agnes,
Biff’s wife, or I guess she would be considered his mate since marriage hadn’t
been invented yet, had been out foraging and gathering. She had laid some cattails
and ferns and other green stuff out on a rock while she thought about what to
do with it.
When Biff
returned he was angry and frustrated with the results of the hunt. When Agnes
asked him how his day went, he went into a frenzy and took a swing at her with
his club. Agnes had been in this kind of predicament before and she was very
agile. She ducked and Biff missed, only to take out his frustration on the
gatherings on the rock. He beat and beat on them, pulverizing everything there.
He threw down his club, and as was his solution to almost any problem, he took
a nap.
Agnes looked
at the powdered heap and knew that they were desperate for something to eat so she
gathered up the dusty ingredients from the rock and added a little water. (Cows
and goats hadn’t been invented yet and dinosaurs were hard to milk, so using
water in this case was acceptable.)
Agnes was a
lot smarter than Biff, females had always been smarter than males, but males
were bigger and stronger and did their best to keep the females subservient.
This attitude prevailed for a long time so women just smiled inwardly and kept
their silence.
Biff and
Agnes always kept a fire going in their cave. It was a necessity. It kept them
warm and kept critters out of the place. Agnes was the very first person to
consider cooking something on it.
She found a
nice flat rock and lodged it over the fire, as soon as it was good and hot she
poured the mixture of the powder and water on it. The batter settled into
little round blobs and when they started bubbling, she flipped them over using
a spatula that she had earlier carved out of tree limb.
The result
was a bunch of little, brown round things, almost a hundred of them that she
immediately named Flat Eddies after her eldest son.
She added a
little wild honey and called Biff. He tried one and roared. Biff was not overly
articulate but she knew that he liked them.
He gobbled
down over half of them, smiled and went back to bed. Agnes ate a few and she
thought they were good too—a relief after eating so much raw meat. She smiled
and started to clean up as women were want to do for centuries to come.
By the time
Biff and Agnes passed on, the Eddie Cake had found popularity among those early
people. It was already being called by many different names but became a
supplement to their early diet either as a side dish to their dinosaur steaks
or, in hard times, their only source of sustenance.
But the
pancake didn’t stop here in the Stone Age, its popularity continued. As civilization
progressed, their popularity grew. Greeks and Romans ate pancakes, sweetened
with honey just like early man ate them.
During the
Elizabethan era the chefs of the time added spices, rosewater, wines, and fruit,
and they were especially favored on Shrove Tuesday, a day of feasting and
partying before the beginning of Lent. The church,
realizing the evils of anything so delicious and objecting to Shrove Tuesday
being popularly called Pancake Day, created mandates.
The
populace knew that pancakes were a good way to use up perishables like eggs,
milk, and butter, and they were delicious so the mandates were mostly ignored.
Pancakes
had a lot of different names and there were a lot of different recipes. In
colonial America
they were known as hoe cakes, johnnycakes, or flapjacks and were made with
buckwheat or cornmeal and served with a generous helping of molasses.
Thomas
Jefferson really liked pancakes. His French chef, Etienne Lemaire, made his
pancakes by pouring dollops of thin batter into a hot pan. The result was what
Lemaire called
“panne-quaiques” and are what we would call crepes.
Whatever
they are called, they are little, round, flat hunks of fried dough that have
been around since Agnes threw batter on a hot, flat rock. And the key word is
flat. “Flat as a
pancake,” is an old saying. I once tried to make round puffy pancakes and they
just were not as good.
BLACK COW PANCAKES
Ingredients
2oz plain flour
Pinch of salt
1 medium egg
3 oz milk
3oz root beer (crème soda, preferably Dr. Browns, may be
substituted)
Oil, for frying
Powdered sugar
Ice cream
Directions
Put flour into a bowl
and stir in the salt. Lightly beat
together the egg and liquid. Pour over the flour mixture, a little at a time.
Whisk it well, into a smooth a smooth pancake batter.
Heat a frying pan and very lightly grease the base of it
with a piece of paper napkin dipped in oil. Pour a thin layer of batter into
the pan. Cook until it starts to bubble
and the edges start to curl back. Flip the pancake over. Cook the pancake briefly on this side, then
slide it out on to a plate.
Cook the rest of the mixture in the same way. Allow pancakes
to cool slightly then sprinkle with confectioner’s sugar.
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