The Coral Gables Times

YOU DON'T COOK PANCAKES

YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND PANCAKES. If you call them griddlecakes or flapjacks, you don't understand them and you might just as well forget ever trying to make them. Griddlecakes are made in restaurants that have shiny steel stoves and chefs in big white pastry hats; they have nothing to do with pancakes which are made in people's kitchens. Flapjacks are made by gold prospectors in little wooden shacks in Grade-B movies; they also have nothing at all to do with pancakes. If you don't understand the distinction, then you won't understand pancakes, either. All is lost, and you should buy yourself a waffle iron. You don't cook pancakes. You make them. You don't say, "I think I'll cook some pancakes this morning." You always say, "I think I'll make some pancakes this morning." In fact, you never say that, either, because there's only one time to make pancakes, and that's on Sunday morning, and you don't have to think you'll make them, you know you'll make them. That is, if you understand them, you instinctively know they are irrevocably linked to sleeping late and people in robes with sleep around the edges of their eyes and dopey sleep-smiles on their mouths as they suggest, "Why don't you make some pancakes?" YOU'd make them anyway. This is Sunday morning. My own understanding of pancakes goes back a long way. It goes back to a city, and to the not unfriendly angling of asphalt street against brick building, the noise and sparks of the Second Avenue El. We would cross under the elevated structure and keep walking west toward Third Avenue. There was a candy store on the corner, and my father would stop to buy the Sunday News and the Sunday Mirror. Those were the days when Terry and the Pirates was still in the hands of Milton Caniff, who skillfully caused the Dragon Lady to reappear at intervals designed to delight the most avid reader of cyclical novels. I always knew when she was about to arrive again. I could sense it weeks before. And then, suddenly, there she was in all her mysterious Oriental beauty, and Pat Ryan would fall in love with her all over again in a nice, clean comic strip way, and then one Sunday she'd be gone. It would be a great many more Sundays before she, or Burma—whose top two blouse buttons were always unbuttoned—appeared once more. We would go up to Third Avenue where all the furniture stores were, and squeezed in between them was a bakery-restaurant where men sat around tables drinking early-morning coffee. The moment we stepped into the place, I could smell all the things baking. There were big polished coffee urns, and counter girls and waitresses in stiff white dresses, and my father would buy six jelly donuts and six crullers, and they would pack them in a white paper bag, and then we'd walk home and up the steps to the fourth floor. My mother would have coffee and cocoa on the stove, and the radiators would be banging all over the apartment. When we sat down to breakfast, we didn't think about pancakes. They were there, though. They were right there in that railroad flat, even though we ate jelly donuts and crullers every Sunday morning. Then once, in 6B, my teacher whose name was Mrs. Manelli read to us from a book by Hamlin Garland called A Son Of The Middle Border, read only one chapter of it, but oh the things in that chapter! I sat there enthralled while Mrs. Manelli's voice conjured that prairie kitchen with its cooking smells. It was very cold outside that day, and the big windows on the left-hand side of the classroom were rimmed with frost. There was a lethargic feeling to the room, the kids leaning forward with their chins cupped in their hands, and Mrs. Manelli's low voice reconstructing a warm and wonderful past. She thought she was teaching us about the prairie—but she was really teaching us all about pancakes. I learned a lot about them long before I first poured batter into a frying pan. ONCE, after I had moved to the Bronx, some friends and I went fishing. City boys don't often go fishing. We got up at four o'clock in the morning, and my mother came into the bedroom while I was dressing and asked, "Are you really going?" and I said, "Sure we are!" We met in front of Artie's house. We were each carrying lunch in brown paper bags. We tied them to the racks of our bicycles and started off for City Island. Our first stop was an all-night hamburger stand where we ordered coffee and scrambled eggs like truck drivers, though we were only fourteen. We cracked a lot of corny jokes and laughed a lot, and the guy behind the counter said we should be on the radio with Jack Benny. We were learning about pancakes. In the navy once, our squadron got caught in a hurricane going from Pearl to Japan shortly after the war ended. On the second day of the storm, I went up as bridge talker, standing the mid watch with a bunch of other guys who were wearing foul weather gear and wishing MGM were there to film all these wet heroics. The communications officer in the radar shack had arranged for the talker to be relieved every hour. At two o'clock, a talker in dry gear came up to relieve me. I went down the ladder to the radar shack, took off the foul weather gear, and hung it up to dry as well as it could before the next man put it on. I sat down with the other radarmen, and we drank coffee, and I told them how terrible it was up there on the open bridge with waves crashing in over the bow of the Continued on page 17 BY EVAN HUNTER The author of "The Blackboard Jungle" and "Mothers And Daughters" happens to be an authority—as he's more than willing to prove Mr. Hunter and The Pancakes, with twin sons Mark and Richard. PHOTOGRAPH BY GUY GILLETTE