The pancake is risen
Yes, it is just about Easter and with it comes egg hunts, little bits of foil from the chocolate eggs appearing in odd places around the house for several weeks, stale peeps, etc. Except the kids are not in egg-hunting mode any longer and we have escaped sans kids to our Finger Lakes House for a week. Out with tradition then. Though I might grab one of those ridiculously gooey Cadbury eggs and share one with Dennis because he has mentioned once or twice over the years (ok, every year) that it just isn’t Easter without a nice Cadbury egg
– yup, there’s a Wikipedia entry for just about everything. I just learned that Cadbury Creme Eggs as they are properly called have decreased in size since their introduction in 1971. Might be the only food item to have not followed the Super-size trend. All the more reason to support the product I say. And Dennis just read this over my shoulder. Apparently, he is not sharing.
But I have gotten carried away. The other tradition that I will not let go in the face of growing children is the wonderful David Eyres Pancake, a recipe that entered our lives in 1966 when it was first published in the New York Times by Craig Claiborne. The pancake is really a puffed, baked pancake and I never knew more about it than that it went into the oven a thin sheet of batter and emerged soon after, puffed and golden and ready to be sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar and lemon. Then, The Times did a piece in their recipes redux section and filled in some of its golden past for me. The full piece gives the recipe, history and then an interesting revision on the whole. I love Claiborne’s heady introduction to his discovery of the pancake, as the Times writer, Amanda Hesser so smartly points out, it is as if he’d met Grace Kelly:
“It was discovered some weeks ago at an informal Sunday brunch in the handsome, Japanese-style home of the David Eyres in Honolulu. With Diamond Head in the distance, a brilliant, palm-ringed sea below and this delicately flavored pancake before us, we seemed to have achieved paradise.â€
Apparently, that description alone allowed some to track Eyre down over the years. Claiborne wrote in a later piece that he caused a bit of trouble of his friend:
I discovered the pancake 20 years ago at a holiday brunch given by friends in Hawaii. The host was David Eyre, who has retired from newspaper and public relations work. Along about midday I arrived at his mountainside home in Honolulu. Describing the event soon after, I wrote: ”With Diamond Head in the distance, a brilliant, palm-ringed sea below and this delicately flavored pancake before us, we seemed to have achieved paradise.”
With the description, I printed a recipe for the holiday pancake. It turned out to be perhaps the most popular recipe to appear in this newspaper. I received a letter from Mr. Eyre telling me with mock anger that he wished he had been more discreet. It seems that he was deluged with telephone calls at odd hours of the night, sometimes from thousand of miles away, commenting on the recipe. It was not uncommon, he said, for tourists to knock on his door to tell him how much they enjoyed his contribution to their holiday breakfasts.
Well, everyone else in the world is eating this pancake in December apparently. We have our own Christmas breakfast tradition which is steak and eggs (to be posted on in its proper time). Naturally, one couldn’t give up on the storied pancake. We just needed another spot for it. So, it was introduced (I would more argue more appropriately) into our Easters. Think on it. Spring is just springing, many are celebrating the risen christ. We celebrate with the miracle of a puffy and risen pancake. It’s delicious, rich…maybe a little sinful — after all Lent is over, right? So whatever one might have given up if one has a mind to do that, certainly sugar and butter are to be reintroduced in all their glory. Even if it’s just on one sunny, happy morning with the silent, snowy hills gleaming all around us.