Cookbook review by Tracey Zabar
This memoir is sweet. I loved Fanny Singer’s stories of her childhood. Imagine Alice Waters packing your lunchbox. The memories are lovely, and the recipes tempting. Next on my list: a fruit galette, and the charmingly named egg fried in a spoon in the fireplace. Have fun making these pancakes.
Recipe excerpted with permission from Always Home by Fanny Singer (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group)
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Pat’s Pancakes
My mother’s parents moved to Berkeley from Southern California in the late sixties, following their westward migration from New Jersey to Los Angeles (via Indiana) when my mom was in high school. By the time I belatedly arrived on the scene (I think they’d given up hope my mom would have a child until my father swooped in at the eleventh hour), they were of that age that some people attain as early as seventy and retain for the balance of their lives. Which is to say, from seventy to ninety-one, my grandparents were that vague thing we call elderly. Still, they were rather spry and, despite not seeming to me to be exactly youthful, were actively involved in my early life. I spent enough time in their mid-century time capsule of a home in the Berkeley Hills to have felt completely at ease there, even fluent in its quirks. The loose brick, say, that would send you tumbling down a few stairs in the terraced back garden. The reassuring smell of the Noxema cold cream my grandmother would slather on her face nightly and remove with a damp washcloth. The nubbly, slightly scratchy texture of the seventies-era textile in which every furnishing in their household was upholstered. The sublime view of the silvery bay from the vast picture window in the living room on a white-hot afternoon. And the cirrus clouds over the distant Golden Gate Bridge, like tails of galloping horses whisked into articulated tangles that my grandmother made paintings of, their pale tangerine hues at sunset rendered in her lovely amateur watercolors.
Whenever I arrived there for a sleepover, I made an immediate pilgrimage to the upstairs hallway to pay homage at the shrine to retro femininity: four silver gelatin portraits of my mother and her three sisters, each snapped at their respective high school graduations. I was transfixed by their beauty; there was something otherworldly about their composure, but then also about their coifs and their clothing. My mother wore her hair in a blond beehive, a string of pearls ringing her neck, her perfect demi-smile, skin radiantly silver toned, surrounded by her beautiful sisters, all eternally eighteen years old.
On overnight occasions, my grandfather would make pancakes in the morning. My grandmother had been a longtime follower of health food trends, even back in the fifties when such things were viewed with suspicion and bacon and eggs were considered salubrious. She also kept a “victory garden” when my mom was little and endeavored to feed her family from it as much as possible. Still, like all housewives of her time, she was a victim of the postwar commodification of foodstuffs and was indoctrinated in a form of cooking that made ready use of the newly marketed culinary “conveniences.” While my mother went from sampling French country cooking more or less straight to innovating proto farm-to-table fare (she could not abide the brown rice and lentil “hippie stews” of the ubiquitous sixties communes), my grandparents’ conversion to an increasingly healthful diet in their older age took them by default to the sometimes wan bulk and health food aisles of those few grocers championing early versions of “organic.”
Which brings us back to the pancakes. My grandfather’s pancakes were no ordinary pancakes. These were superfood pancakes before superfood was a word in common currency. Chock-full of wheat germ and whole grain flours and maybe powdered skim milk and yogurt and definitely grated apple and mashed banana, they resembled absolutely nothing purveyed at my own house down the hill. I loved them. My grandfather and I would always make them together, meticulously measuring and then sifting all of the dry ingredients, carefully decanting the milk (could it have even been soy?) into the wet measuring cups. They were distinguished by the addition of banana, whose sugars would caramelize upon contact with the hot pan and redeem any amount of wheat germ or other criminally nutritious ingredients. The final step before cooking, which was my favorite, was to fold the beaten egg whites (frothed to glossy peaks with one of those old-fashioned eggbeaters I’m sure they’d had for more than forty years) carefully into the wet batter. This folding process required all of my focus and restraint, since I was—and remain—by nature a hasty and impatient cook. My grandfather, by contrast, was a picture of prudence—in cooking and in life. If I was folding too violently and risking the deflation of the carefully aerated whites, he would softly place his hand over my smaller one and guide the wooden spoon into gentler motions. This process meant that the batter would be striated with fluffed whites, which in turn guaranteed an utterly pillowy pancake. I don’t know if my mom learned this trick of separating the eggs and beating the whites from her father, but she always insisted on it at home if she ever made pancakes, which was rarely, and only ever from a mix (but not Bisquick! It came from Bette’s Oceanview Diner down on Fourth Street). To this day, I don’t know why she didn’t make them fully from scratch—I think maybe she was under the impression that they were more complicated to produce and required more “baking skills” than in fact they do. I really learned that you could make pancakes as easily as a bowl of cereal only when I was eighteen. A family friend gave me a recipe that called for nothing more than a cup of flour, a cup of milk, some baking soda, an egg (no whisking of whites required), and a pat of liquefied butter. The result was just as tasty as the labored pancakes of my youth. I’ve since become the pancake authority in our house, which is hardly that illustrious a title. It simply means that whenever I’m home, my mom requests some version of Fanny’s Pancakes. They do not contain wheat germ.
Still, there was something legitimately special about my grandpa’s pancakes, which I miss dearly. And not just because they were invariably served with tiny links of organic chicken-and-apple sausage on the side—a flavor so indelible I can conjure its taste just by writing the sentence. I would always take a little sausage in my fingers, wrap it in one of those golden-brown pancakes like an oversize duvet, pronounce it a “pig in a blanket,” and pop it into my mouth. Absolutely no maple syrup allowed! This was a sugar-free household!
My mother’s parents moved to Berkeley from Southern California in the late sixties, following their westward migration from New Jersey to Los Angeles (via Indiana) when my mom was in high school. By the time I belatedly arrived on the scene (I think they’d given up hope my mom would have a child until my father swooped in at the eleventh hour), they were of that age that some people attain as early as seventy and retain for the balance of their lives. Which is to say, from seventy to ninety-one, my grandparents were that vague thing we call elderly. Still, they were rather spry and, despite not seeming to me to be exactly youthful, were actively involved in my early life. I spent enough time in their mid-century time capsule of a home in the Berkeley Hills to have felt completely at ease there, even fluent in its quirks. The loose brick, say, that would send you tumbling down a few stairs in the terraced back garden. The reassuring smell of the Noxema cold cream my grandmother would slather on her face nightly and remove with a damp washcloth. The nubbly, slightly scratchy texture of the seventies-era textile in which every furnishing in their household was upholstered. The sublime view of the silvery bay from the vast picture window in the living room on a white-hot afternoon. And the cirrus clouds over the distant Golden Gate Bridge, like tails of galloping horses whisked into articulated tangles that my grandmother made paintings of, their pale tangerine hues at sunset rendered in her lovely amateur watercolors.
Whenever I arrived there for a sleepover, I made an immediate pilgrimage to the upstairs hallway to pay homage at the shrine to retro femininity: four silver gelatin portraits of my mother and her three sisters, each snapped at their respective high school graduations. I was transfixed by their beauty; there was something otherworldly about their composure, but then also about their coifs and their clothing. My mother wore her hair in a blond beehive, a string of pearls ringing her neck, her perfect demi-smile, skin radiantly silver toned, surrounded by her beautiful sisters, all eternally eighteen years old.
On overnight occasions, my grandfather would make pancakes in the morning. My grandmother had been a longtime follower of health food trends, even back in the fifties when such things were viewed with suspicion and bacon and eggs were considered salubrious. She also kept a “victory garden” when my mom was little and endeavored to feed her family from it as much as possible. Still, like all housewives of her time, she was a victim of the postwar commodification of foodstuffs and was indoctrinated in a form of cooking that made ready use of the newly marketed culinary “conveniences.” While my mother went from sampling French country cooking more or less straight to innovating proto farm-to-table fare (she could not abide the brown rice and lentil “hippie stews” of the ubiquitous sixties communes), my grandparents’ conversion to an increasingly healthful diet in their older age took them by default to the sometimes wan bulk and health food aisles of those few grocers championing early versions of “organic.”
Which brings us back to the pancakes. My grandfather’s pancakes were no ordinary pancakes. These were superfood pancakes before superfood was a word in common currency. Chock-full of wheat germ and whole grain flours and maybe powdered skim milk and yogurt and definitely grated apple and mashed banana, they resembled absolutely nothing purveyed at my own house down the hill. I loved them. My grandfather and I would always make them together, meticulously measuring and then sifting all of the dry ingredients, carefully decanting the milk (could it have even been soy?) into the wet measuring cups. They were distinguished by the addition of banana, whose sugars would caramelize upon contact with the hot pan and redeem any amount of wheat germ or other criminally nutritious ingredients. The final step before cooking, which was my favorite, was to fold the beaten egg whites (frothed to glossy peaks with one of those old-fashioned eggbeaters I’m sure they’d had for more than forty years) carefully into the wet batter. This folding process required all of my focus and restraint, since I was—and remain—by nature a hasty and impatient cook. My grandfather, by contrast, was a picture of prudence—in cooking and in life. If I was folding too violently and risking the deflation of the carefully aerated whites, he would softly place his hand over my smaller one and guide the wooden spoon into gentler motions. This process meant that the batter would be striated with fluffed whites, which in turn guaranteed an utterly pillowy pancake. I don’t know if my mom learned this trick of separating the eggs and beating the whites from her father, but she always insisted on it at home if she ever made pancakes, which was rarely, and only ever from a mix (but not Bisquick! It came from Bette’s Oceanview Diner down on Fourth Street). To this day, I don’t know why she didn’t make them fully from scratch—I think maybe she was under the impression that they were more complicated to produce and required more “baking skills” than in fact they do. I really learned that you could make pancakes as easily as a bowl of cereal only when I was eighteen. A family friend gave me a recipe that called for nothing more than a cup of flour, a cup of milk, some baking soda, an egg (no whisking of whites required), and a pat of liquefied butter. The result was just as tasty as the labored pancakes of my youth. I’ve since become the pancake authority in our house, which is hardly that illustrious a title. It simply means that whenever I’m home, my mom requests some version of Fanny’s Pancakes. They do not contain wheat germ.
Still, there was something legitimately special about my grandpa’s pancakes, which I miss dearly. And not just because they were invariably served with tiny links of organic chicken-and-apple sausage on the side—a flavor so indelible I can conjure its taste just by writing the sentence. I would always take a little sausage in my fingers, wrap it in one of those golden-brown pancakes like an oversize duvet, pronounce it a “pig in a blanket,” and pop it into my mouth. Absolutely no maple syrup allowed! This was a sugar-free household!
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