Flat as a pancake

My Soul Sister sent me a birthday gift package that contained, among other sundries that I giggled over, a bag of pancake mix. Chocolate pancakes, actually. We have not yet had the courage to open the packet and try the stuff, but it smells divinely chocolate and promises much that we all like very much, even though Small Cat is forbidden the sweet brownness and would rather chew on her kitti bikki anyway. But every time I open the larder door, I peek at the bag and wonder, just what would I let myself in for if I used it?

I have a passion for pancakes, perhaps nurtured by the ones my mother would make for me a long time ago, when I was a child and she believed that her cooking was the only thing between me and certain starvation. She would beat up and egg with some flour and milk, a little salt and a pinch of pepper, and spread lacy thin rounds of it on a hot griddle. We ate them, many at a time, with lots of salted butter and a hearty appetite. Those days soon ended, however, as we both became alarmingly rounded and ate these instead of regular food, causing merry havoc at the dining table.

When we lived in Geneva, Switzerland, my mother and I would occasionally walk down to the main square and browse through the shops for school and home supplies. And, after we were done, we would stop by the creperie just outside the main department store and order ourselves a crepe to much on before trekking back home. For her, it was the sweet kind; for me, I preferred the crepe rolled around cheese or jambon fume, fine shards of smoked ham. Once in a while, our wicked sides would emerge and we would slowly savour our way through a chocolate crepe, with molten brown heaven within the fragile envelope of soft dough.

A few years later, when I was in the United States as a student on my own, my friends and I would drop by the Pancake Cottage near Stony Brook on Long Island, where I was based. While they drenched their ’cakes in maple syrup or fruit compote, I would go comparatively austere, with a little bit of butter and perhaps a sprinkle of nuts. Then I discovered the cheese stack, American style. It was all about calories, those things that never bothered me then, since whatever I ate seemed to evaporate almost instantly and allowed me to slide into the slimmest jeans possible without too much heavy breathing. It was all about delicious and tangy cheese, sandwiched between thick, spongy, slightly sour buttermilk pancakes, making a gooey, pully, stringy, heavenly forkful that could be twined around the fork with happy warmth.

And then the calories starting attaching themselves to inconvenient parts of my anatomy. So now when I order or eat pancakes, I make sure that I have the buckwheat kind, allegedly higher in fibre content and lower in calories, with whipped butter, if any, and a little fruit rather than all that cheese and fat. I look wistfully at plates around me that have lashings of regular butter and strips of crispy, salty bacon that just cries to belong to me rather than where they are. And I sigh gently as my dining companions ask for more butter, some grated cheese please and perhaps some chocolate sauce. But I still fit into those jeans. They wear stretch-waist trousers.