CITY Issue 54

Living the Good Life in the Big City THE AMUSED BOUCHE THE AMUSED BOUCHE’S PANCAKES THE AMUSED BOUCHE’S PANCAKES INGREDIENTS 3 eggs 1 c. flour 1 c. milk 2 tbs. sugar 1 tsp. baking powder Combine all ingredients in one bowl. Mix with wooden spoon. Don’t overwork—don’t worry if there are lumps; they will disappear. Let stand 15 to 20 minutes. Stir again. The batter should be smooth. Put pan or skillet (not griddle) over low-tomedium heat. Add butter (not oil); when it has melted, drop in batter, as much as you want your pancake to be big. Cook until bubbles appear all over the top. Flip, cook until brown on bottom (not very long). You might have to flatten it a bit with a spatula. Throw the first one away. Repeat, this time without throwing away. Do not flip more than once as that will make them tough. Eat. You can also make the recipe without sugar and eat them, like crêpes, with ham and/or cheese. Flash in the Pan Can a single family recipe tell the tale of one person’s life journey? Eva Hagberg discovers that her Sunday-morning pancakes stir up more than a few tasty memories. THREE EGGS. ONE CUP MILK. ONE CUP FLOUR. TWO TABLE- spoons 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 can’t 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 out of 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-start my memory. It was like recalling the beginning of 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 out through our arguments-throughaction over our respective pancakes. It was by making pancakes that I first learned that I’m much more likely to be passive-aggressively controlling than aggressively forthcoming. It was by making pancakes with him 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 casually making pancakes was what planted the seed for eight-person dinner parties four years and many neighborhoods later. Several years after first 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 breads, 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? PHOTO GRA PH Y B Y B ET H G A LTON CITY 43 F O O D S T Y L I S T: D O R A J O N A S S E N . D I G I TA L T E C H : M I K E W O O D

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CITY Issue 54

CITY Issue 54 Contents Letter from CITY Our Friends Action Wanted City Moment The City Life The Amused Bouche On the Rocks Fast Food City Insider: Austin Fit How We Live: The Bedroom City Insider: Warsaw In Rogue The Value of Vintage Taking the Plunge Raising the Bar The Science of Scent Changing of the Guard The New Fashion Cities A Cut Above Chrysalis What Dreams May Come Dawn & Dusk Will o' the Wisp Where To Buy It Socials Icon

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