Cornmeal Pancakes

It’s appropriate that I start things off with a breakfast recipe: breakfast is traditionally at the beginning of the day (although the less pedantic among us realize that it’s a great end of the day meal, too) and breakfast foods are some of my favorites.

Pancakes are one of my favorite breakfast foods. Actually, saying that they’re “one” of my favorites isn’t quite accurate — I can think of at least three different kinds of pancakes we had with some regularity growing up, and since then I’ve had many variations. This recipe combines a couple of my favorites pancake features: buttermilk and cornmeal. The result is a fluffy pancake with texture reminiscent of cornbread.

Another reason to love this recipe is that it’s quite forgiving. I’ve made it a lot, and as a result have made lots of mistakes. Delicious, still edible mistakes; they might not be as fluffy if you don’t separate the egg or let the batter rest, but they’ll survive¹.

The Dutch Delight excels at recipes with instructions like these: ones that don’t really tell you how to complete things, or that don’t use all the ingredients (honey, in this case). I also wonder what distinguishes a “nice” pancake from others. In this case, I’ve found that the best approach is frying the pancakes in an electric skillet at around 350° F. I use a ¹⁄₃ cup measure to dish out the batter into the skillet.

A word about frying pancakes: I’ve always associated pancakes with an electric skillet. I don’t really know how common these are; Richard seemed to think it was a pretty odd appliance when he first saw it. But it actually works great. I’ve also managed to do these on a skillet on the stove when I didn’t have an electric skillet available. It was challenging to control the heat, but the results were passable.

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¹ Note that while the mistakes may be edible and even delicious, they won’t look as good or be as light and fluffy.