I’m obsessed with pancakes. They just seem to make it seem like everything’s going be ok. I remember being taken round Mexico in the early ’80s and feeling absolutely aghast at the different-ness of it all – the great, fusty indoor meat markets, soldiered by flies and children poking big sugary stacks of churros; the lumpy pillows impregnated with bed sweat in seedy posadas; the dead dogs on the roads becoming one with the tarmac…but sometimes, if we were lucky, my parents would check us into an American-style hotel and the highlight for me would be the short stacks of ‘hot cakes’ in the morning. Those little steaming discs of comfort soused in maple syrup would restore order to my culture-shocked system.
I had my uncle and aunt to dinner on Shrove Tuesday and, though my aunt has gone carb-free, they are demons for the pancakes. We started off really simply with some Italian sausages with puy lentils and herbs – a bit of amontillado worked well with the fennel seeds in the bangers (although there was a slightly dubious bottle of gooseberry wine lurking around the table too).
My mum and I made a group effort with the batter – she made up a mix by eye which I then waded in to bulk out because I was terrified we wouldn’t have enough (greedy). The main thing for me is that it’s quite an eggy batter which makes it nice and rich. I had picked up a bottle of PX earlier in Brindisa and thought it might be able to make sweet music with some golden syrup. I let them bubble away gently together, a delightful amber blend that when poured over the piping hot pancake had everyone shouting for more. In fact my uncle claimed it was the best he’d ever had!
