World-Famous Flapjacks
by Anthony Monaco
I’d always heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. This comes from the 1900s when food companies wanted to sell more bread. I also heard that the kitchen is the heart of a home and that cooking is one of the most useful skills anyone can possess. This seems to be true. Cooking has always been a uniting force for my family. I remember learning to use the stove and helping my mother cook pancakes. She would always make them following the recipe, and although they were always delicious there was something missing.
When I was a boy me, my older brother, and my little sister had all gone to visit my Nana and Pupa. We slept on the living room floor on an inflatable mattress and in the morning were woken up for breakfast by my Pupa. His voice bellowed cheerfully from the kitchen, “Who wants some of my world-famous flapjacks?” as though they were a widely celebrated commodity. Looking back, I’m sure he was just boasting for us children, but even now I feel like he was being genuine that he had made the perfect pancake, or flapjack. We all sat down and dug in. I ate a good two or three myself, almost made myself sick as I was only four at the time, but they were too good. They were perfectly golden and just a little burnt. Each one was an almost perfect circle and buttered to perfection. I know it’s easy to let nostalgia win, to say, “Oh, how it used to be” or, “It was so much better back then,” but no, they were perfect. A stunning example of how any good American flapjack should be made, an illustration of what one should strive for when cooking a world-famous flapjack.
That moment is something that I cannot shake. I couldn’t go back to how pancakes were before this moment. That was until we moved away. We moved from New England to North Carolina. A cruel joke if you ask me. So far from home from my aunts and uncles, my cousins, my Nana and Pupa, yet it was still NORTH Carolina. The people were most assuredly not northern by any metric. They seemed to detest the very idea of the north, Yankees they called us, witches, or devil worshippers. I remember these cruel names from kids in my elementary and how they were so sure of their pride of the south. Better weather, better taxes, better food. So assured this was fact, but they had never had one of Pupa’s world-famous flapjacks. The only food they talked about was McDonald’s and Bo-Jangles. Fast food, commercialized convenience, cheap alternatives to the time and care of a home cooked meal. But these were the foods of the south and we couldn’t go back to the true north to the land where Yankees dwell. Sooner or later, maybe due to the chemical additives I then suspected were in southern cuisine, I began to forget what a world-famous flapjack was.
When we had first moved down south my Mother has become a stay-at-home mom. She cooked, cleaned, picked us up from school, and cared for us. Unfortunately though, it was to my understanding that she was unable to make a World-Famous Flapjack. We would get breakfast at school, or cereal at home, or when my family visited (which was always few and far between). This paired with the foods of the south and the cruelty of youth, children constantly singing the praises of the beloved fast-food chains that sustained their diets of bland eggs and soggy potatoes. It was through the constant ingestion of school food, fast food, and people’s “home cooked” crap food, that the memory of the World-Famous Flapjack was slowly lost, and the taste of the south slowly crept in. I hated it.
Fortunately, though, my Mother never let it win out. She always made home cooked breakfasts whenever she could, usually on the weekends or during any school break.
One late fall or early winter (I can’t remember which and neither could my mother) we sat down to a hearty breakfast at our table and although I can’t remember what else was there, I recall the flapjacks; the taste, the texture, the smell. It was a taste that I knew was world famous because my Pupa had told me when he made them for me. It was his recipe and my mother had cooked them to the same golden brown with that lightly burnt finish. It was this moment that cemented my memory of this taste of home, in my Nana and Pupa’s house waiting for Pupa to make more pancakes for me and my siblings to hastily devour. This wasn’t the taste of the north, of beautiful white winters I missed, this was the memory of family. It was a memory of a shared meal with relatives I would not be seeing for some time and who, unfortunately I will not see again. But the taste of flapjacks, World-Famous or not, will always remind me of their place in my heart.
I write this now and look back with many questions of what made them world-famous and how Pupa made them so good. It was simple. After some light conversation with my Mom, I realized that my Pupa was correct in his claim of World-Famous Flapjacks. He didn’t do anything fancy, it was three simple steps: you buy a box of Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix, you follow the instructions, and you serve. I was shocked almost speechless I could have sworn it was something else my mother had taught me. All her tricks to make perfect pancakes. Surely, she had hidden some kind of secret to recreate these, but she hadn’t. She confided that she had been as shocked as I was. She told me, “I wouldn’t have believed it either if I hadn’t watched him do it.” And then she told me something I never wanted to hear: “The only thing that made them Pupa’s World-Famous Flapjacks was the man himself and that he made them with love.” My Mom had told me blasphemy. My Pupa had made them from a box. No modification. It was a shock at first. The more I think, though, the happier this fact makes me. Pupa made them from a box, one anyone could buy off a shelf, one that is famous (to some degree). It may not be the secret recipe of my childhood, but it made me realize that my Mom was right. The only thing special about Pupa’s flapjacks was that he made them.
Instructions: How I like to remember them.
Heat: Warm heart with the memory of family.
Combine: Let nostalgia mix with memory till you have the desire to eat flapjacks.
Pour: your heart and soul into the pancakes just like Pupa used to.
Turn: Give them to the people you care about and make a new memory.
Anthony Monaco is a sophomore at Columbia College pursuing a major in studio art and a minor in creative writing. He mostly practices illustration and ceramics. This is his first literary publication.