Saturday, November 22, 2008

SWEDISH PANCAKES

I am home in northern Minnesota for the weekend. The snow is still light, the air is nippy, the sauna fired up. And this morning, I awoke to Swedish pancakes.

This was the favorite breakfast of my childhood. Growing up, I didn't eat standard fluffy buttermilk pancakes very often. Instead, my parents made these delicious floppy, crepe-like, Scandinavian pannekaker.

Essential to their deliciousness is that you slather them in maple syrup (Minnesota style) or in lingonberries and lightly sweetened sour cream (Scandinavian style) and then roll them up.

Let me tell you, a roll-up of tender buttery pancake and real maple or creamy tart lingonberries sure beats the typical sodden wedge of your standard flapjack.

Here's the recipe, as printed in my brother's hockey player cookbook from nineteen-eighty-something. (My grandmother found it the other day, yellowed and grease-spotted but staples still intact. I think I'm going to have to post some select excerpts from it after this.)

I usually put in only a tablespoon or two of sugar--it doesn't really need four (a full quarter-cup!) But whatever, I can eat these with my fingers straight off the griddle. And, as I have witnessed firsthand, kids can easily eat ten and even twenty of them in one sitting.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ah, we have a similar food in our family. Traditional dessert crepes with butter, powdered sugar, and strawberry jam if wanted. We would have races to see who could eat the most in one sitting.