"so long as we keep on eating, we don't have to do the dishes"
Yesterday, being International Pancake Day, seemed like a good day to make some buckwheat pancakes. While Laura Ingalls Wilder writes about pancakes in almost every "Little House" books (no pancakes in On the Banks of Plum Creek), readers most often associate them with Almanzo Wilder, who seems to be able to eat enough pancakes in one sitting to feed a family of four. Mother Wilder cooks ten pancakes at a time in Farmer Boy, and the family eats "pile after pile" of them. In The Long Winter, it's learned that Almanzo can make even better pancakes than his mother, and he eats at least twenty-one of them in one sitting. He didn't bother to count the ones he ate while Royal was doing the chores.

Do you know what Mother Wilder's pancake rule was? In the "Little House" books, a rule is the same as a receipt, which is the same as a recipe. In my case, I should have remembered the rule not to run get your camera to photograph pancakes while you still have some on the stove, because that batch will surely burn. The fantastic Little House Cookbook (by Barbara Walker, 1979) contains recipes for both buckwheat pancakes (The Long Winter) and pancake men (Little House in the Big Woods), but here's a recipe for common pancakes, courtesy of Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine, September 1874:

Make a light batter of three spoonfulls of flour, three eggs well beaten, and half a pint of milk, some of which, with the eggs, is to be mixed with the flour; to the other part, put a quarter of a pound of butter melted. Then mix altogether, and put into the frying-pan in a very thin layer. Fry with lard or dripping; but do not put any butter into the pan to fry them after the first frying, as they will give out enough afterwards to keep up the stock. Sugar should be served to eat with them. Or, when eggs are scarce, make the batter with flour, small beer, ginger, etc. Or, clean snow with flour, and very little milk will serve, but not nearly as well as eggs.

A couple of fun pancake trivia bits from the LH books:

In The Long Winter, Pa is invited to eat pancakes and bacon with Royal and Almanzo. There was molasses on the table and the coffeepot was boiling. In the manuscript, the boys send Pa home with a bottle of molasses. Awwwwww!!

In Little House on the Prairie, Laura and Mary wake up to the smell of bacon and coffee and they hear pancakes sizzling. In the manuscript, it's that they could smell bacon and coffee and see Ma frying pancakes. In one version of the manucript, they could see her frying them in the spider over some coals.

I listened hard, and I couldn't hear much sizzling coming from my pancakes.
- posted by pioneergirl at 9:31 PM