Frankie Fights Food

I have a confession to make: I hate pancakes. I really do. They’ve always been too thick, to dry, to in need of mountains of syrup to be edible. I wasn’t raised on pancakes… I grew up with my very-not-French grandmother’s crêpes and have, in my adult life, bothered her to no end trying to get her batter recipe out of her. It’s not that she isn’t willing to tell me. If that was the case, I’d just sneak into her recipe box while she was napping or at church. No, the problem is this: she has no recipe.

“It’s just some flour, milk, butter and eggs,” she says, as though that explains it. Unfortunately, flour, milk, butter and eggs combine to make about one million different things! The only thing that matters is the proportions… and so in the crêpe batter department, I’m flying blind. Now, of course I’ve scoured websites and cookbooks. I’ve tried out different recipes and every time, my crepes are rubbery-looking and dry. But now, here I am, in the Land o’ Crêpes, with fingers crossed that some kind of French fairy god-chef is looking over my shoulder, silently guiding my spatula and sending agents to tell me things like, “Brown the butter first”, “Don’t forget to steam the milk” and “Let the batter settle in the fridge”.

When I heard these things, they were filled away under “Possibly more useless advice” but I was never given what I wanted: a ratio, a system, scientific reproducibility. So, one day, today in fact, I just sort of gave up on measurements, on tips and tricks, on cruising the internet for recipes to try. I stood up, walked into the kitchen and just started making crêpes. I decided that if an intuitive sense is good enough for my grandmother, come hell or high water, it was going to be good enough for me.

So I tossed a big chuck of butter into a pot, letting it melt down and brown a bit. By most standards, I probably used too much, but I love French butter. I keep it in the soap dish by the sink just to have it handy. When I added the milk to the butter I wasn’t even paying attention to how much I poured. To be honest, I was busy trying to take a photo of the pour itself. I thought it would look dynamic. This should give you an idea of how much I was paying attention to the actual making of the crêpes.

As I am without a measuring cup here, I’d say I used one china teacup’s worth of flour, one china teacup’s worth of water and then two eggs, which I added last. I was at least paying enough attention that I wasn’t going to let the hot butter and milk scramble my eggs. My batter ended up a little lumpy, tiny little islands of flour coming up with the bubbles. Rather than obsess, I tossed it into the fridge and sort of bummed around the house, practicing my guitar and hanging out on Facebook, steadfastly refusing to even think about the batter de-bubbling in the fridge. (You see that’s supposed to be the trick: you let the batter work out the bubbles from the mixing in the fridge so they’ll hold together better when you actually cook them. That and it cools off the butter a bit, which should, by all accounts, make just about anything fluffier.)

In the past, I’ve tried to use butter in the pan to keep it from sticking. MISTAKE. This time I unceremoniously tossed the batter onto a hot pan and voila! Crêpes! After I churned out a few, I even started to get fancy with the flipping, tossing them high in the air and deftly catching them, unfolded and unbroken, in the pan.

I had tried so long to make crêpes with the exacting precision of a chemist, thinking that it would turn out perfectly but virtue of the science of it all. In the end, no, this batch wasn’t perfect, but they weren’t rubbery, they weren’t dry, they were definitely not a failure. They were everything I remember and love (and miss, at 5,000 miles away) about my Grandmother’s crêpes: buttery, flaky, warm, lent sweetness only by whatever you drizzle on top or spread inside. As cheesy as it sounds, when food is a labor of love, it never has to be “perfect” to be absolutely perfect. I feel confident that in 50 years, I’ll be turning my grandkids into avid pancake-haters too.