When is a Pancake Not a Pancake?

What a breakfast, what a breakfast, International House of Pancakes. What a breakfast, what a breakfast, your house of pancakes makes. International House of Pancakes, one of the great American contributions to world cuisine. No comment. But I do strongly agree that pancakes make a stupendous breakfast, or lunch, or even dinner. And pancakes are what we'll be serving up this episode of Gastropod. That's right, you're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I'm Cynthia Graber. And I'm Nicola Twilley. And this episode, there's a lot to digest as we tackle shocking allegations that latkes and Yorkshire puddings are actually pancakes. Yes, you heard me correctly. I know, I know. That battle is still to come. It all boils down, though, to that age-old question that I know you all have spent years pondering. What makes a pancake a pancake? Moving from the philosophical to the historical, we get to the bottom of why anyone would want to put an image of a blackface minstrel show character on a box of what became America's most popular pancake mix. All that, plus what should really be on the menu at the International House of Pancakes. Here's a hint. It's not what they've got now, and the pancakes are not something you'd want to top with syrup. This episode is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater. I've eaten a lot of pancakes. Pancakes were big in my house growing up. We ate so many pancakes. We loved going to diners. My first job was actually at a diner. I was a busboy, and so I ate a lot of pancakes there as well. Casey Highsmith writes about food and food history, and after eating all those pancakes, she definitely knows what one is. So a pancake is, you know, it's a cake that it's a very loose batter, if we're getting scientific, food science-y with it. And it's very thin and it cooks usually in a griddle and it's nice and flat. Distinguished from a bread, which is a dough, which you need and often is made with something that has gluten. That second voice, that's Ken Albala. He's professor of history at the University of the Pacific and he's been on the show before. he starred in our beans episode. He's also the author of a short book all about pancakes. So according to Ken, bread has to have gluten, but pancakes just really need some kind of a starch. A pancake can be made of anything. So it can be made of acorns or chestnuts or teff or rice or anything really doesn't doesn't need gluten at all. In fact, it's better without it. Because for a pancake, you want a batter, not a dough. You want something that you can pour onto your griddle or pan. Note, griddle or pan, not deep fat fryer. I also defined it as something that's fried in a very shallow amount of oil because if you deep fry it, it's going to come out very crispy. And if it's super crispy, it's no longer a pancake. It's a fritter. So how big should these soft, floppy, not crispy pancakes be? I don't think there should be any size requirement because there are tiny little pikelets, you know, in New Zealand and in Scotland, and they make little pancakes. And then there are enormous doza, which, you know, take up a whole plate or an injera, which can be enormous platter size. That's diameter. But what about height? Is there a mandatory minimum of aeration required to qualify as a pancake? A pancake needs no leavening at all. In fact, you could just use flour and water, and that'll make a decent pancake. The fat will cause it to bubble, the air inside. But you can use just eggs, which is a kind of historical way of doing it. The British still use just eggs. In the U.S., we got in the habit of using leaveners, chemical leaveners, baking soda and baking powder, because, you know, the acid combining with the alkaline creates these gaseous bubbles and it just makes a lighter pancake. And I think when Americans taste British pancakes, they think this is really eggy and flat. Obviously, I believe British pancakes are extremely delicious, but they are indeed quite flat. French crepes are pretty slimline, too. But fluffy American pancakes are shock horror, not the fluffiest. I know in Asia, they go for these super fluffy, thick pancakes that are just crazy large, and they rely on a type of whipped egg white situation and almost like a souffle-like imitation in their pancake. So you can imagine whipping the egg whites first and then folding them into the batter. You can get a like six inch thick pancake that is light and fluffy. And really, that's my favorite pancake. It's a pain in the neck to do, but it really comes out buttery and crisp on the edge and just light as a pillow inside. That's magnificent. All those whipped egg whites do make it sound like a souffle. But Ken says there's less flour in a souffle and it goes even higher than the Japanese pancakes. And the real difference is the souffle is baked. That's key because, as Casey said, pancakes have to be cooked on the stove, in a pan, or on a griddle. But this is where the lines get blurry because Japanese souffle-style pancakes are cooked in a pan, but they are also often baked a little, too. So I usually start it on the stovetop and then put it in the oven to continue baking on top so it sets. Wait, what? I thought the whole deal was that pancakes are cooked in a pan or on a griddle. Well, it's cooked in a pan first and then it goes into the oven. Pinning down a pancake is clearly a tricky business. The starch can be anything. The leavening's not required. The oven can be involved. And believe it or not, a pancake doesn't have to be sweet. Well, Americans do tend to think of pancakes as something sweet with maple syrup, usually artificial, unfortunately, poured on top of it. But I think savory pancakes are much more interesting in some respects. You could put chives in there. You could put the bacon directly in the pancake. I think seafood in a pancake is a wonderful thing, even a can of tuna, you know, mixed into the batter and just fried. That might sound a little odd to most Americans, but seafood is a common ingredient in the delicious savory Japanese pancake called okonomiyaki. Still, canned tuna in a pancake? Now we are truly coloring outside the lines. But can can't be stopped. There's no limits in what it can contain. And of course, a crepe. You know, there are savory crepes that are just rolled around pretty much anything. This pancake definition is starting to feel a little expansive. So what is flat and starchy but isn't a pancake? Well, we call the Chinese little pancakes that the Peking duck goes in. We call them pancakes just because they're flat. But that is actually made of a dough, and it's closer to a noodle, really, than it is to a pancake because it's not a batter. And a flat bread, like any bread, needs to have some gluten in it to keep the structure. Otherwise, it's going to be really, really breadful, you know, just tough and thick. Whereas a pancake can be made of any kind of starch at all. So a pancake is a lot more diverse, let's say, than a flatbread. I think we can all agree that naan and roti and tortillas are not pancakes. But I can't imagine crispy Peking duck going inside anything other than a pancake, even if Ken says that is technically wrong because those wraps are actually made from a dough, not a batter. But then, so what is a dough versus a batter? Pretty simply, if you can pick it up, it's a dough. If you can pour it, it's a batter. I know that there are some really, really super hydrated doughs that, you know, are almost impossible to pick up. But that's kind of the exception that proves the rule that eventually you do pick that thing up, do shape it by hand. you could never, in any circumstances, shape a pancake batter by hand. But that opens the door to things that are basically pourable batters before they're cooked, but that I've never thought of as a pancake before. For one, Ken argues that latkes are pancakes. We eat latkes on Hanukkah and we fry them in a lot of oil. These are not pancakes. They're fritters. But, well, when someone asks what latkes are in English, we do say they're potato pancakes. Plus, Ken says the pancake connection has to do with how you prepare the potatoes before you fry them. There are two very distinct ways of making them. And the way I usually like to do it is I grate them and squeeze out all the water, take them in lumps, put them into a shallow pan of oil, and they get crispy. And those are really, they're like hash browns more than anything. A lot of people, including the person I'm married to, makes them in the blender. They're blended up with onions and they are literally a batter and they're poured into the pan and they become a real pancake in that case. I don't like them particularly, but that's the way she does them. OK, so latkes can be made from a pourable batter. But the whole point is you're supposed to fry them in a lot of oil to celebrate the oil that was supposedly found in the temple that kicked off what became the first Hanukkah. They're supposed to be crispy. So I am still on team not a pancake. Ken is not content with disrupting Jewish pancake beliefs. He's also coming from my ancestral non-pancakes, such as that mandatory accompaniment to roast beef, Yorkshire pudding. That's a tough one. I think technically a Yorkshire pudding and a Dutch baby are pancakes. I think they qualify because they're batter. They're cooked in a pan, even though they're baked in the oven. They fluff up, but ultimately they're just a big fluffy pancake, really. Ken, you're blowing my mind. The savory, puffed up, crisp deliciousness with the pillowy, eggy interior that you drown in gravy. He says, that's a pancake. And that's not the only treasured British culinary tradition he's coming for. Crumpets are made from a pourable batter and they're cooked on a griddle. And I thought they were bread products, but Ken says, nope. So I would say that crumpet is then a pancake. It's just made in a mold. Most Americans, though, will not have had the pleasure of a crumpet. So please, introduction time. You poor deprived people. A crumpet is an English muffin-sized bread product. Sorry, Ken. It has a slightly chewy texture riddled with sponge-like holes that all the butter you slather onto it after you toast it trickles into in a most delightful way. And despite my firm belief otherwise, Ken says it's a pancake. Because if it's a batter and it's poured and you're not rolling it out like an American biscuit and cutting it and then baking it, If you're pouring it in a pan, it's a controlled, very tight, British, uptight pancake. Nikki, you and Ken can agree to disagree here. But as we're touring the international landscape of pancakes, Ken says that you can find them everywhere. As I'm thinking through the whole world, I'm hard-pressed to come up with a place that doesn't have a kind of pancake. Some of these pancakes are multi-purpose. They serve as an edible plate and utensils combined. In South India, you get the dosa, which is a huge crepe made from a fermented batter of rice and black lentils. often served rolled up into a cylinder shape with the fillings inside. And in Ethiopia, there's what's called injera. It's large and spongy and flat, and you put all the other food you're going to be eating on top of it. Well, injera is an enormous pancake cooked on one side, but a lid goes on it, so it sort of steams the top. And it gets this lovely, chewy kind of texture. And when it made of teff it brown And it sour because it actually fermented naturally And the texture is lovely and then you break off pieces of it or you use one of the injera as a sort of scoop. You know, you just take a piece of it and scoop the food up. But that's as good as food gets, I think. These are big, sit-down pancakes, but in some places, pancakes are portable. Breton buckwheat galettes are crepe-style pancakes wrapped around ham and cheese. My personal favorite pancake in the world is a classic Beijing street food breakfast, John Bing. It's a mung bean and wheat crap with an egg spread on it and lots of fun sauces. And then it's layered with crispy wontons and folded up into a spicy, crunchy, savory, delicious package. Pancakes as street food are hard to find in the U.S. But elsewhere, it does work. Like a big greer in Morocco is a sort of little pancake. It's only cooked on one side, so it has holes. But you'd find, you know, stacks of them sold, and you'd just walk away with it in your hand. One winter in Florence, I stumbled across a market, and there was a guy at a stand selling necci, which are warm chestnut flour pancakes. They're nutty and toasted-tasting, and they were wrapped around some kind of cheese, and it was exactly what I needed on that chilly February day. Ken says the reason pancakes are universal is because they're elementary. They're likely one of the first starch-based dishes humans ever made. People all over the world found that they could get a lot of nutrition from starchy things. And even before we domesticated crops like corn and wheat, we've been foraging as many starches as we could and then boiling them or crushing them to release the nutrients. So I imagine that the very first kind of pancakes would have been something like, imagine a Native American. And I'll just picture the Yokuts who lived right where I'm sitting now in Central Valley of California, taking acorns, crushing them up in a grinding rock. They took a watertight basket, poured water into it, heated it with hot rocks, put into the basket, and then they would put in the acorn flour, goes into that, and it creates a kind of mush. This mush is acorn porridge, but looked at another way, it's batter, just ready for the griddle. And at this point, they take the mush, take it out, throw it onto a hot rock, and it becomes a pancake. You know, it's, you know, it holds together, gets crispy around the edges. And so even before we have pans, I think there's some kind of, obviously this was not prehistoric times, but I think it gives us a sort of hint at how prehistoric hunters and gatherers would have eaten pancakes. World's first pancake or Prudhoe pancake. But for a dish that likely goes back so far, the pancake is surprisingly elusive in the written record, at least when it comes to actual recipes. Well, this is really tricky because there are definitely people eating pancakes because they're referred to in literature. And, you know, people will say, cook this as flat as a pancake, assuming the person knows what that is, even though there's no recipe for it. There's things very, very much like pancakes. I mean, the word placunta, which means in Greek, a flat cake, is something like a pancake. There's no recipe. So we don't know whether it's a batter or a dough. And the reason there's no recipe for these early pancakes is that actually for most of the pancake's history, only poor people were eating them. And cookbooks didn't include poor people food. If you were wealthy enough, you would have a lot of fat, lard usually or oil, and you wanted your crisp to come out really crunchy. And so if you didn't have a whole lot of money, the last thing you would do is waste the whole pot full of fat. You'd use it for many other things. So I think using very little fat in there gives you the soft pancake that we think of today. When the first pancake recipes do start showing up in cookbooks in the 1500s, Ken says they're not actually pancakes. I think there are some very close ones that sort of look like pancakes or called crepes that are made with a bowl that has holes in it. You pour the batter in and that goes into the fat. And you can actually do that in very little fat, but it becomes crispy and much, much more like a funnel cake. And of course, the word crepe comes from crisp, meaning it was originally a kind of funnel cake. It wasn't a pancake at all. Pancakes are not. These definitely sound super tasty. They're usually made with wine, which I think evaporates as the batter hits the fat. And so they are fluffy and really lovely. Ken says the earliest pancake that's really a pancake is in The Good Huswife's Handmade for the Kitchen. It was published in 1594. You can tell it's floppy and not crispy because of the amount of fat. Because it says take a lump of butter the size of your finger. You know, that's not a whole lot. Finally, a pourable batter-based pancake that was just pan-fried rather than deep-fried. Ken has tried out a bunch of the earliest pancake recipes, and some are better than others. There's one also that doesn't work at all, which I found kind of amazing. It has a lot of cream in it and only like three teaspoons of flour, which it just didn't work when I tried to cook it. But the ones that do, the early ones, are very, very eggy. They're somewhere between an omelet and a pancake. and I think British pancakes are still that way. There's still much more egg to flour ratio and the egginess, of course, is cut. I mean, Americans think of British pancakes, they say, what, you put lemon on it? That makes no sense whatsoever. An American would never in a million years put lemon on a pancake. It just seems absurd. This might not be how I would regularly consume pancakes, but I don't know, it still sounds delicious to me. It is delicious. It is not absurd at all. But what is actually kind of weird is that we Brits only really eat these delicious lemon and sugar-dusted, eggy, crepe-style pancakes once a year on Pancake Day. Well, Pancake Day is Shrove Tuesday. Neither Pancake Day nor Shrove Tuesday are going to be familiar terms for many listeners. And to be honest, I have always been more on the pancake-eating side than the church-based Shrove business. But the point is, this is the day before Ash Wednesday, which is the official start of Lent in the Christian calendar, and you're apparently supposed to be kind of clearing up the last regs of Carnival and confessing your sins so that you're all ready for the 40 days of grimness ahead. In most places in Europe, there were fasting regulations which said you were not allowed to eat meat or meat products, which includes eggs and butter and milk and cheese and things like that, for that whole 40-day period leading up to Easter. And so there are traditions in lots of different countries about how to use up all those eggs and butter and milk. In England, they use those ingredients up in pancakes. But we don't just make and eat those pancakes. We also toss them, we fight for them, and we sometimes even run races while flipping them. The OG pancake race is in a little village in Buckinghamshire called Olney. The Paris Church of Olney in Buckinghamshire prepares for its big moment of the year, the Stroh Tuesday pancake race. The contest has been held in the village since 1445. Only village women over 16 are permitted to enter. Pancakes must be tossed three times during the race, and the winner receives a kiss from the verger. A verger is a member of the clergy, not sure what they're doing handing out kisses. Ken told us the legend that supposedly led to the very first pancake race. There's a story that the bell rings for everyone to go to church, and this woman is still cooking her pancakes, and she says, I'm not abandoning them on the fire. I'm going to run right to the church and keep flipping my pancake. So they have a race now to the church steeple with people, you know, flipping this pancake. And the idea is whoever gets there first wins. But you have to continually flip as you're running, which is a real trick. And they're off. From the marketplace to the church is 415 yards, a long way to toss a pancake. Halfway, the pressures begin to tell The winner collects her check for 25 pounds in the frying pan Where else? Who says British cuisine is boring? I'm not making that claim, at least not on air But I must say, I do also like US-style pancakes Possibly even more than British ones, although they are very different The story of how the pancake became American, coming up after this break Hey, Kara Swisher here. I want to let you know that Vox Media is returning to South by Southwest in Austin for live tapings of your favorite podcasts. Join us from March 13th through the 15th for live tapings of Today Explained, Teffy Talks, Prof G Markets, and of course, your two favorite podcasts, Pivot and On with Kara Swisher. The stage will also feature sessions from Brene Brown and Adam Grant, Marquez Brownlee, Keith Lee, Vivian Tu, and Robin Arzon. It's all part of the Vox Media podcast stage at South by Southwest, presented by Odoo. Visit voxmedia.com slash SXSW to pre-register and get your special discount on your innovation badge. That's voxmedia.com slash SXSW to register. Really, you should register. 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If you're ready to sell smarter, run your business more smoothly, and stress less, Right now you can get up to off Square hardware at square slash go slash gastro That S dot com slash G slash gastro Run your business smarter with Square Get started today We said some of the earliest pancake recipes appeared in the Middle Ages, but the first pancake recipes that really seem more like today's American pancakes come from the Netherlands in the 1600s. And it may actually be that the Dutch introduced it into, you know, the New Netherlands and New York. So I think that may be a closer connection to where we got our light, fluffy pancakes. And the Dutch love pancakes. I mean, they have pancake houses like we do. However they got to the U.S., what is clear is that they have long been super popular here. Pancakes star in the very first cookbook written by an American and published in the United States. There are multiple different recipes. There are buckwheat pancakes, and some involve native ingredients like corn. Early Americans did make them out of different grains. I don't think many Americans would think of a corn pancake or a rye pancake or even a buckwheat pancake, even though that's just as good as it gets as far as I'm concerned. So people, you know, in places where you either couldn't grow flour because of the climate or you didn't have enough money for flour, which is the most expensive of grains, pancakes are something you can make out of absolutely any grains. So a combination of corn and rye was very typical, which is a delicious, delicious combination. combination. Even though these were more varied than our usual white flour pancakes today, and frankly, these sound tastier to me too, they were closer to what we eat now. They'd become a recognizably American food. Well, pancakes become lighter and fluffier and chemically raised. We start throwing things in them like blueberries or chocolate chips or whatever. And, you know, the American, it's a cliche, but I think the whole idea of abundance and choice and big servings, You get a stack of pancakes. I mean, that's a lot to eat. That heartiness is perhaps why a pancake breakfast became associated with lumberjacks and outdoorsmen and log cabins. They didn't have box mix, but they could carry around a starter. The idea is that if you're a lumberjack, you carry around your sourdough with you. And that all you need to do is just scoop that out onto the pan and then add a little more flour and it lasts forever. And, you know, we'll be like a sourdough starter, right? And I assume a lumberjack is out in the middle of nowhere in the forest. You know, you just make a quick fire. I don't know how true that is. You know, it probably comes from literature or popular imagination more than anything. One name for these early pancakes was flannel cake because of the association with those flannel clad bearded lumberjacks. But pancakes had lots of different names at the time. Yeah. So there's, you know, hoe cakes and no cake and flapjack. And those names are almost meaningless. I mean, people decide these crazy folk etymologies of them. The hoe cake supposedly was cooked on a hoe, which I actually tried. Of course you did. And I made a fire outside. A hoe goes, you know, has a parallel right angle. So you'd have to hold it directly over the fire, in which case you burn your hands. Turns out there's more than one kind of hoe. No, the hoe actually refers to the pan. It's just an old word for pan. And as Ken said, another word in America for a pancake is a flapjack, which was a little confusing to me when my friend showed up from London and told me she had a flapjack in her purse for if she got hungry. I was in England this summer, and there's a shop in, I was in Chichester, and it said flapjacks, and I'm thinking, you sell pancakes here? It's not. They're like bars, and it's a totally different thing. The contemporary British flapjack is a dense, chewy cousin of a granola bar made of rolled oats, butter, and golden syrup. No one seems to know how this term came to mean two such very different things. No idea. No idea. Pancakes also became famous in America as one of the very first branded boxed mixes. And you'll likely recognize the name of that very famous brand. And remember, when you serve Aunt Jemima... Pancake days is happy days. Come on, don't go! We wait, don't go! Aunt Jemima emerged as a logo for ready-made pancake mix in 1889 and was used to market it initially by the two men who developed this image. This is Rache Richardson. She's a professor at Cornell University. The two men Rache is referring to are Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood. Chris was a journalist and Charles was a mill worker, and their story marks a darker turn in the pancake story. They started a new business that year in 1889. They acquired a bankrupt flour mill in Missouri, and they were looking to disrupt the flour business. Neither of them was a cook or a baker, but no matter. At the time, mass-produced packaging in the form of paper bags was new on the scene, and Chris and Charles had the idea of putting wheat flour, corn flour, salt, and a raising agent all together in one of these groovy new bags. so that anyone wanting a pancake could just add milk and drop the batter on a griddle. These two guys who couldn't really cook decided to test their new product by having the local librarian over. He was a guy named Perd Writer. What a name. And when he tried their product, he said they were very tasty flapjacks. But Charles and Chris still needed a name for their new pancake mix. And while he was pondering this, Chris went out to enjoy an evening at the minstrel show. Minstrel shows had already been around for a while at that point. It spans at least back to the mid-1820s and the legacy of Thomas Daddy Rice, as he was known, who saw an enslaved person doing a dance called Jump Jim Crow. and he noticed that dance and adopted it and performed it. And it was increasingly popularized throughout the 1830s. By the late 1880s, when Chris wandered in for some entertainment, minstrel shows were everywhere. These were largely white people, white men, performing in blackface and also cross-dressing for the female characters. There was lots of singing and dancing. And so initially, these performances appeared on stage and theater and were very much at the heart of American entertainment and also the source for disseminating stereotypes of people of African descent that were very pernicious. One of the songs Chris Rutt heard, a super popular song originally written by a Black musician called Bill Kersands, was the Aunt Jemima song. We don't have any recordings from the time, but here's a modern version. According to researchers, Kersanz based his tune on a traditional field song in the South called Promises of Freedom. And the lyrics include a mistress who says she'll free her slaves when she dies, including Aunt Jemima, but then she lives forever. That's maybe why the song in particular was popular with both the white and black communities at the time. And Chris Rutt liked the name Aunt Jemima, and he liked the minstrel show character it was referring to even more. In the 19th century, there were these images that emerged, again, within plantation culture, and particularly within the plantation myth, so that the Black woman, for instance, was frequently represented as a mammy. And so the Mammy figure, for instance, in terms of her physical appearance, was typically represented as being plump. She was the epitome of the so-called happy slave, delighted to serve the master class, her master and mistress, and to take care of their children. Remember, this was all taking place after the Civil War had ended and slavery was officially over. But a lot of white Americans still had a nostalgia for the plantation days, and the Mammy figure was beloved. I think in part because it was a familiar image and it fed into the culture where narratives of the past and enslavement in particular were premised on nostalgia and romance. And so this image was the epitome of that nostalgia. nostalgia. As part of this overall whitewashing of the Old South, plantation culture had come to represent a life of leisure and abundance and good food for white people. And so all of those associations traveled with Aunt Jemima too, which to Chris Rutt made her the perfect image for a pancake brand. Chris and Charles created a new product called Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix, but it didn't take off and they went broke. They sold their mill and their brand to another guy in the milling industry named R.T. Davis. He added powdered milk to the mix so you could literally just add water. And at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, he hired a Black woman named Nancy Green. Who was brought in to literally flip pancakes in a giant flour barrel and proved to be a hit. Literally, this was a building shaped like a flour barrel where Aunt Jemima slash Nancy Green was serving up pancakes. And in a world's fair filled with fabulous buildings and the world's first Ferris wheel, the flour barrel was it. And so this began her long-term work as, you know, the human embodiment of Aunt Jemima. In real life, Nancy Green was a 59-year-old servant who worked for a Chicago judge. She had been born into slavery on a plantation in Kentucky, but she got a whole new fake backstory as Aunt Jemima, courtesy of none other than Purr-D-Wright, the taste-testing librarian. He created advertising copy filled with all sorts of made-up stories about her life with new characters introduced. You know, where you have this image of Colonel Higbee, based on a plantation in Louisiana, who is delivered time after time because of Aunt Jemima, whose pancake mix kind of saves the day. In one story that Purd wrote, and remember, all of this is totally made up. There is no Colonel Higby and no real live Aunt Jemima. Anyway, Union soldiers threatened to rip the mustache off Higby's face. But Aunt Jemima offered the soldiers pancakes, and as they were enjoying themselves, Colonel Higby escaped. Pancakes to the rescue. Aunt Jemima, the human-embodied brand, ended up becoming super, super popular. Nancy Green traveled the country playing Aunt Jemima at fairs and festivals. People mailed in and paid actual money for a ragdoll version of Aunt Jemima and her made-up husband and kids. And her fictional backstory was elaborated in endless ads. There was an Aunt Jemima radio show that lasted from 1923 until the 1950s, and she even was immortalized in an entire pancake restaurant at Disneyland in the 50s. Try the Disneyland sensation, Aunt Jemima Party Pancakes. My, they're good. And be sure to visit Disneyland. By this point, Nancy Green was long dead. She died in a car crash in 1923. And here's what's really bizarre. Her obituaries describe her life story as if she was literally Aunt Jemima, a former slave whose pancakes made her famous. The whole Aunt Jemima story is wild. And obviously also, as we've been saying, is based on the racist stereotype of a black woman as first enslaved and then as a servant One thing that telling about the ads is that originally there were never any white women in them That way they could kind of imagine themselves in the household with a black woman working for them And I think for Americans for some Americans post 19th century they like the idea that a jolly heavy black woman was serving them food And obviously that was someone doing labor for you. And the way they sold Aunt Jemima was saying, here, she's in a box. One book that tells this whole story is just titled Slave in a Box. Long story short, Aunt Jemima came to be synonymous with pancakes for a large swath of America, but there was one group she was never a hit with. There's been a longstanding critique of Aunt Jemima. This played out over time. Back in the 1920s and 30s, it was already clear that many African Americans absolutely hated Aunt Jemima. People wrote articles about the brand. They called for a ban of the pancake mix, but unfortunately, none of that ended up putting much of a dent in her popularity. Quaker Oats, which had bought the brand, did eventually change her outfits. You know, the bandana was ubiquitous, and then, you know, it came off and was replaced by the headband. I graduated from high school in 1989, and so that was literally 100 years after the emergence of the Aunt Jemima logo. And in that year, the significant thing was that the headband came off and Aunt Jemima was depicted wearing pearls. And so this was a more refined image associated with her. Unsurprisingly, this minor rebrand did not satisfy her critics. Public Enemy named and shamed Aunt Jemima in their 1990 protest song, Burn, Hollywood Burn. They played Aunt Jemima is the perfect term, even if now she got a perm. Still, Quaker Oats didn't retire the Aunt Jemima label until 2020. It was too valuable as a brand. There's this sense of the Aunt Jemima pancakes being a kind of comfort food, and it is associated with very positive personal memories for some people. And so I think that that also explains the longstanding adherence to that image. But finally, after decades of protests and op-eds, including one written by Richer, Quaker Oats put Aunt Jemima out of her misery. After a racial awakening, Aunt Jemima is getting a new name. Quaker Oats said the breakfast food brand will be renamed Pearl Milling Company and will launch in June. Long overdue. But before Aunt Jemima was permanently retired, she sold not only pancake mix, but pancake syrup, too. And that leads to the question, what even is pancake syrup? The answer after the break. strategies for real people with real budgets and why financial feminism isn't just a buzzword, it's a movement. Get ready for an unfiltered conversation about money, entrepreneurship, and what it really takes to build both personal wealth and a business empire. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff. We've already established that British people put lemon on their pancakes, but here in the United States, other toppings reign supreme, usually sweet ones. My mom always had peanut butter and brown sugar. She was not a syrup person, and I did not like that kind of intense combination, but I do love the weird little crunch that brown sugar does on top of a pancake, just a little extra, you know, more sugar on top of sugar. My dad didn't like anything on his pancakes, so I think that's also a little bit of an anomaly, especially in America, you know, just a dry pancake. He occasionally would put blueberries on top, which seemed to be just like a dangerous, or not dangerous, but it seemed to be a very tricky thing to eat with blueberries running about. I agree with Casey that peanut butter on pancakes is not a typical choice. And blueberries on top of pancakes is all wrong. They're supposed to go in the pancakes if you have them at all. A topping is supposed to be a liquid, really a syrup. So I'm a, I, and still to this day, my go-to combo is syrup with a, with a sprinkle of brown sugar. And this syrup is called, in a very self-explanatory sort of way, pancake syrup. As a kid, pancake syrup was a staple in Casey's home for topping pancakes and more. Pancake syrup, also sometimes called table syrup, was used to pour on all sorts of things, biscuits, all sorts of breakfast baked goods. But it was some kind of artificial sugar syrup, most likely high fructose corn syrup or corn syrup. It had some kind of artificial coloring like caramel, the artificial, you know, caramel coloring that you find in so many products like sodas and stuff today. And then it would have had some other kind of natural flavorings, including some kind of maple, artificial maple imitation maple flavoring. When Casey was growing up, she had nothing to compare it to. She didn't know if the artificial maple tasted anything like the real thing. We never had maple syrup. I don't think I had maple syrup growing up until I was at least in high school, maybe college. Gather round, kids. We're going back to the dark days of Maya and Casey's youth when maple syrup was really expensive. I hear you. It's not cheap today, but it is so much cheaper than it was. For me, growing up in England, it was super extra expensive because we don't have the right kind of tree and we had to import it. But even here, when I was a kid, it was really expensive and we only had the fake stuff in the fridge. We have a whole Gastropod episode on maple syrup and you should check it out. But the short history is that two things eventually made maple cheaper. Technology improved to get the sap out and also Canada broke up their maple cartel. The democratization of access to maple syrup has broadened wildly beyond my wildest dreams as a child. Even so, maple syrup still feels precious to Casey. When her kids pour it onto their pancakes too generously, she can't help but feel the pain. You know, I find myself wanting to, like, dip things in their plates afterwards because it feels so wasteful. Even back when maple was really expensive, it was still more common in New England and other regions where, you know, there were maple trees. In the South, they traditionally used sorghum syrup. Sorghum can be not off-putting, but it is very distinct. It has a very kind of earthy flavor. This regional preference for sorghum dates back at least to the Civil War when there were blockades, and the South ended up relying on sorghum as a sugar substitute. They had a bunch of different substitutes. It was not the only one, but it was one that was readily available. And sorghum still grows readily in a lot of pockets of the South. And it's not native to the South, but it's an ancient grain that's actually from Africa, and it's theorized that it was brought over to actually feed enslaved peoples. Other than sorghum syrup, the other topping they used throughout the South was something called Cairo syrup. I've been eating Cairo syrup ever since I was no higher than a baseball bat. Pour on plenty of Cairo syrup, like I do. Nothing flavors a stack of cakes like delicious Cairo. Yes, Mickey Mantle really goes for Cairo syrup. Cairo's dextrose food energy helps you star on any team. Cairo was not originally developed to fuel baseball stars. It was launched in 1902 to use up some of the acres and acres and acres of corn waving their golden heads across the Midwest. If you've never had it, it's a very, very thick, it's corn syrup, basically. It is the basic ingredient and at its basic state, clear. It wasn't explicitly for pancakes. It was used in baking. In the South, a lot of us have pecan pie recipes and a lot of our grandmothers have recipes that are taken directly from Cairo. marketing materials. Caro has a few different versions of the syrup today, not just the clear one, but also a dark syrup and a medium colored one called pancake syrup. Her grandparents always used the clear one, though, on their pancakes. So you'd pour this clear, thick syrup that is thicker than molasses on top of your pancakes and eat them with your eyes closed. Eyes closed, because even as a kid, Casey knew clear syrup was just wrong. For me, I, you know, I wanted to have this beautiful golden color. And we didn't have clear Cairo in my house growing up. This was only at my grandparents. And, you know, my parents at least had the dignity to buy. They treated us well enough to buy artificially colored corn syrup so that it didn't look so weird. Because nonetheless, despite me never having had maple syrup growing up or having it so infrequently that I didn't really know what it was, I knew that pancake syrup was supposed to be a certain color. Today, in the 21st century, brunch is a lifestyle, high fructose corn syrup is looked down on, and pancakes come with all kinds of trendy toppings. I've seen pancake stacks topped with such things as guava curd and pomegranate molasses. So I think that there's a lot of really cool potential. And I know Food 52 did some fun toppings with like miso butter and different types of like savory toppings. And those are all great, But I don't think those are going to replace, like, in our souls what we want for pancakes. For Casey, there's literally only one answer to what is supposed to top a pancake. Pancakes, for me, need to have syrup. And in my house, if we're out of syrup, we're not having pancakes. And we wait until we have more syrup. And that syrup has to be maple. Ken agrees. Topping has to be real maple syrup. There's nothing else for me, I think. And I usually like to actually dip it on the side. I think if you pour it right on top, it just soaks in and then everything is mushy by the end. So I have a little bowl of maple syrup and I usually eat it with my fingers. I have to admit, ripping off pieces and just dipping it in is pretty great. I agree with the maple syrup decision. There is no other acceptable topping for an American pancake. But ripping and dipping pancakes with your fingers? Ken, we love you, but you're an animal. Now that we have the topping question answered, there's one final question we were left with. Casey is working on a book about the history of cakes. And so given the name, Pan, Cake, we were wondering, is a pancake a kind of cake? This feels like the, is it a sandwich question? It feels very loaded. Here at Gastropod, we do specialize in the tough questions. In the course of her research, Casey has spent a lot of time thinking about cake and its meanings. To her, cakes mean celebration. And so the question of whether pancakes are a cake all comes down to the scale of the celebration. Pancakes, you know, are, I kind of put them in if I had to make a spectrum. There's cupcakes on this other end. Like for a special celebration, maybe for your birthday. And then there's pancakes that are down here that are every morning celebration. And so you have this, it's still a cake, but it's in this like lesser category of cake. So I celebrate every time I get to eat pancakes. Thanks this episode to Casey Highsmith, Ken Albala, and Riche Richardson. We have links to their work on our website, gastropod.com. Thanks also to our fantastic producer, Claudia Geib. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode. Till then.