When is a Pancake Not a Pancake?

We aren't afraid to ask the big questions here at Gastropod, such as: what exactly is a pancake? If you think you know the answer, prepare to have your mind blown. It turns out the sweet, syrup-covered stack of American breakfast fame are far from the only members of the pancake family—and there are some truly controversial cakes in the wider pan family. Speaking of controversy: if you've made instant pancakes from a certain famous mix, you might not realize the racist history behind it. Join us for the shocking story of Aunt Jemima, stay for the great pancake debate, and don't blame us if you end up craving something flattish, fluffy, and floppy for your next meal! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  International House of Pancakes, one of the great American contributions to world cuisine.

• 0:17Nicola Twilley?

  No comment. But I do strongly agree that pancakes make a stupendous breakfast, or lunch, or even dinner.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:33Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  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?

• 0:57Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:18Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 1:34Speaker 02

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• 2:12Speaker 02

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• 2:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:05Nicola Twilley?

  Casey Highsmith writes about food and food history, and after eating all those pancakes, she definitely knows what one is.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  So a pancake is, you know, it's a cake that you're it's it's a it's a very loose batter, if we're getting scientific, food science-y with it. And it's it's very thin and it cooks usually in a griddle, and it's nice and flat.

• 3:27Speaker 04

  Distinguished from a bread, which is a dough which you knead and often is made with something that has gluten.

• 3:33Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  A pancake can be made of anything, so it can be made of acorns, or chestnuts, or tef, or rice, or anything, really doesn't doesn't need gluten at all. In fact, it's better without it.

• 4:00Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  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.

• 4:18Nicola Twilley?

  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?

• 4:25Speaker 04

  I don't think there should be any size requirement because there are tiny little pikelets, you know, in New Zealand and in Scotland, they make like little pancakes. And then there are enormous doza, which, you know, take up a whole plate or an injera, which can be enormous, platter sized.

• 4:42Nicola Twilley?

  That's diameter, but what about height? Is there a mandatory minimum of variation required to qualify as a pancake?

• 4:49Speaker 04

  A pancake doesn't, 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 US, 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.

• 5:19Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:47Speaker 04

  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.

• 6:05Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  And the real difference is the souffle is baked.

• 6:15Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 6:29Speaker 04

  So I usually start it on the stove top and then put it in the oven to continue baking on top. So it sets.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  Wait, what? I thought the whole deal was that pancakes are cooked in a pan or on a griddle.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  Well, it's cooked in a pan first and then it goes into the oven.

• 6:44Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 6:55Speaker 04

  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 very, 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.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:32Speaker 04

  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.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  This pancake definition is starting to feel a little expansive. So what is flat and starchy but isn't a pancake?

• 7:45Speaker 04

  Well, we call the Chinese little pancakes that the peaking 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 dreadful, you know, just tough and, and thick. Whereas a pancake can be made of any kind of starch at all. So, so a pancake is a lot more diverse, let's say, than a flat bread.

• 8:16Nicola Twilley?

  I think we can all agree that naan and roti and tortillas are not pancakes. But I can't imagine crispy peaking 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?

• 8:33Speaker 04

  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.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  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.

• 9:20Speaker 04

  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.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  Okay, 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.

• 10:06Nicola Twilley?

  Ken is not content with disrupting Jewish pancake beliefs. He's also coming for my ancestral non-pancakes, such as that mandatory accompaniment to roast beef, Yorkshire pudding.

• 10:17Speaker 04

  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.

• 10:32Speaker 00

  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.

• 10:44Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  So I would say that crumpet is then a pancake. It's just made in a mold.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Most Americans, though, will not have had the pleasure of a crumpet. So please, introduction time.

• 11:04Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  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.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  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.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  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.

• 11:49Nicola Twilley?

  Some of these pancakes are multipurpose. They serve as an edible plate and utensils combined. In South India, you get the dosa, which is a huge crap made from a fermented batter of rice and black lentils, often served rolled up into a cylinder shape with the fillings inside.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  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.

• 12:12Speaker 04

  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's made of tef, it's brown and it's sour because it's 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, that's as good as food gets, I think.

• 12:44Nicola Twilley?

  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, jianbing. 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.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  Pancakes as street food are hard to find in the US.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  But elsewhere, it does work. Like a big grir in Morocco is a sort of little pancake. It's only cooked on one side, so it has holes, but you'd find stacks of them sold and you'd just walk away with it in your hand.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  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.

• 13:39Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  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.

• 14:00Speaker 04

  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 Yocats 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.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  This mush is acorn porridge, but looked at another way, it's batter, just ready for the griddle.

• 14:37Speaker 04

  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 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.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  World's first pancake or prudo pancake.

• 15:04Nicola Twilley?

  But for a dish that likely goes back so far, the pancake is surprisingly elusive in the richer.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  Record, at least when it comes to actual recipes.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  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 plakunta, which means in Greek, a flat cake. Is something like a pancake. Um, there's no recipe, so we don't know whether it's a batter or a dough.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  And the reason there's no recipe for these early pancakes is that actually for most of the pancakes history, only poor people were eating them. And cookbooks didn't include poor people food.

• 15:47Speaker 04

  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.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  When the first pancake recipes do start showing up in cookbooks in the 1500s, Ken says they're not actually pancakes.

• 16:15Speaker 04

  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 then, 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.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  Pancakes or not, these definitely sound super tasty.

• 16:40Speaker 04

  They're usually made with wine, which I think evaporates as the batter hits the fat. And so they are fluffy and really lovely.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  Ken says the earliest pancake that's really a pancake is in The Good Huswifes Handmade for the Kitchen. It was published in 1594. You can tell it's floppy and not crispy because of the amount of fat.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  Because it says, take a lump of butter the size of your finger. You know, that's, that's not a whole lot.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Finally, a portable 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.

• 17:11Speaker 04

  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.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  This might not be how I would regularly consume pancakes, but I don't know. It still sounds delicious to me.

• 17:51Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  Well, Pancake Day is Shrove Tuesday.

• 18:07Nicola Twilley?

  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 dregs of Carnival and confessing your sins so that you're all ready for the 40 days of grimness ahead.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  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.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  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.

• 18:57Nicola Twilley?

  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 Alney.

• 19:10Speaker 05

  The parish church of Alney in Buckinghamshire prepares for its big moment of the year, the Shrove Tuesday Pancake Race. The contest has been held in the village since 1445.

• 19:22Speaker 05

  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 clergy.

• 19:29Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 19:38Speaker 04

  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 pancakes. 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.

• 20:05Speaker 05

  And they're off.

• 20:08Speaker 05

  From the market place to the church is 415 yards, a long way to toss a pancake.

• 20:16Speaker 05

  Halfway, the pressures begin to tell.

• 20:20Speaker 05

  The winner collects her cheque for £25 in the frying pan. Where else?

• 20:24Nicola Twilley?

  Who says British cuisine is boring?

• 20:26Speaker 00

  I'm not making that claim, at least not on air.

• 20:29Nicola Twilley?

  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.

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• 22:39Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 22:48Speaker 04

  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, that may be a closer connection to where we got our light fluffy pancakes. And the Dutch love pancakes. I mean, it's, they have pancake houses like we do.

• 23:02Nicola Twilley?

  However, they got to the US, what is clear is that they have long been super popular here. Pancake 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.

• 23:20Speaker 04

  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.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  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.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  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.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  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.

• 24:31Speaker 04

  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, will 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.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  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.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there's, you know, hoe cakes and no cake and flapjack and, 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, you know, which, which I actually tried.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  Of course you did.

• 25:24Speaker 04

  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.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Turns out there's more than one kind of hoe.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  No, the hoe actually refers to the pan. It's just an old word for pan.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  And as Ken said, another word in America for pancake is a flapjack, which was a little confusing to me when my friend showed up from London and told me she had a.

• 25:46Nicola Twilley?

  Flapjack in her purse for if she got hungry.

• 25:48Speaker 04

  I was in England this summer and there's a shop in, I was in Chichester and it said flapjacks. And I'm thinking, do you sell pancakes here? It's not. They're like bars and it's a totally different thing.

• 25:59Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 26:10Speaker 04

  No idea, no idea.

• 26:12Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 26:21Speaker 09

  And remember, when you serve Aunt Jemima.

• 26:23Speaker 00

  Pancake Day is Happy Day.

• 26:29Speaker 10

  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.

• 26:48Nicola Twilley?

  This is Roche Richardson. She's a professor at Cornell University.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  The two men Roche 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.

• 27:09Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  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 Ryder. What a name. And when he tried their product, he said they were very tasty flapjacks.

• 27:41Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  Minstrel shows had already been around for a while at that point.

• 27:53Speaker 10

  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.

• 28:12Speaker 10

  And he noticed that dance and adopted it and performed it. And it was increasingly popularized throughout the 1830s.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  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 crossdressing for the female characters. There was lots of singing and dancing.

• 28:35Speaker 10

  And so initially, these performances appeared onstage and theater and were very much at the heart of American entertainment. Then also the source for disseminating stereotypes of people of African descent that were very pernicious.

• 28:54Nicola Twilley?

  One of the songs Chris Rutt heard, a super popular song originally written by a black musician called Bill Kersans, was the Aunt Jemima Song.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  We don't have any recordings from the time, but here's a modern version.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  According to researchers, Kersans 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.

• 29:32Nicola Twilley?

  And Chris Rutt liked the name Aunt Jemima, and he liked the minstrel show character it was referring to even more.

• 29:38Speaker 10

  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.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  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.

• 30:24Speaker 10

  I think in part because it was a familiar image and it fed into the...

• 30:32Speaker 10

  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.

• 30:50Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  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 Colombian Exposition, he hired a black woman named Nancy Green.

• 31:27Speaker 10

  Who was brought in to literally flip pancakes in a giant flower barrel and proved to be a hit.

• 31:37Nicola Twilley?

  Literally, this was a building shaped like a flower 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 flower barrel was it.

• 31:50Speaker 10

  And so this began her long-term work as, you know, the human embodiment of Aunt Jemima.

• 31:59Nicola Twilley?

  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 Perd Wright, the taste-testing librarian. He created advertising copy filled with all sorts of made-up stories about her life with new characters introduced.

• 32:23Speaker 10

  You know, where you have this image, Colonel Higbee.

• 32:28Speaker 10

  Based on a plantation in Louisiana, who is delivered time after time because of Aunt Jemima, whose pancake mix kind of saves the day.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  In one story that Perd wrote, and remember, all of this is totally made up. There is no Colonel Higbee and no real live Aunt Jemima. Anyway, Union soldiers threatened to rip the mustache off Higbee's face. But Aunt Jemima offered the soldiers pancakes. And as they were enjoying themselves, Colonel Higbee escaped. Pancakes to the rescue.

• 32:57Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  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.

• 33:28Speaker 11

  Try the Disneyland sensation, Aunt Jemima Party Pancakes. My, they're good. And be sure to visit Disneyland.

• 33:37Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 33:52Speaker 00

  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's 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.

• 34:10Speaker 04

  And I think for Americans, for some Americans, post 19th century, they liked 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.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 34:41Speaker 10

  There's been a longstanding critique of Aunt Jemima. This played out over time.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  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.

• 35:05Speaker 10

  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.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  Unsurprisingly, this minor rebrand did not satisfy her critics. Public enemy named and shamed Aunt Jemima in their 1990 protest song, Burn, Hollywood Burn.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  Still, Quaker Oats didn't retire the Aunt Jemima label until 2020. It was too valuable as a brand.

• 36:03Speaker 10

  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.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  But finally, after decades of protests and op-eds, including one written by Riché, Quaker Oats put Aunt Jemima out of her misery.

• 36:28Speaker 12

  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.

• 36:37Speaker 00

  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.

• 36:53Speaker 13

  Support for the show comes from USA Facts. Income inequality, entitlements, housing costs. Want to really see what the government is up to, what it costs, and who is benefiting? Check out a debate on the American dream between Scott Galloway and Ben Shapiro. It's not your typical soundbites from boring politicians reading talking points. The debate is framed by an informative set of government facts from USA Facts. And then Ben and Scott get into it. There are sharp differences, some common ground, and data and facts that leave you knowing more. Check out the full debate now on the USA Facts YouTube channel.

• 37:36Speaker 14

  Support for today's episode comes from Delta, official airline of the National Women's Soccer League. Traveling is basically magic. It creates opportunities, it fosters understanding, it expands horizons, it connects people and communities to each other and to their own potential. Those are the values that drive Delta. With up to 5,500 daily Delta and Delta Connection flights to more than 300 destinations on six continents, Delta is committed to helping you explore your world. Whatever gives you the travel bug, Delta is here to help you get there. Visit delta.com for more info. Delta, wherever the journey takes you.

• 38:22Speaker 15

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you, based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 38:59Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  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.

• 39:43Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  So I'm a, I am still to this day, my go to combo is syrup with a sprinkle of brown sugar.

• 40:03Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 40:44Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  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.

• 40:57Nicola Twilley?

  Gather round, kids. We're going back to the dark days of my 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.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  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.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  The democratization of access to maple syrup has broadened wildly, beyond my wildest dreams as a child.

• 41:40Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  You know, I find myself wanting to like dip things in their plates afterwards because it feels so wasteful.

• 41:55Speaker 00

  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.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  Sorghum can be, not off-putting, but it is very distinct. It has a very kind of earthy flavor.

• 42:09Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 42:17Speaker 03

  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.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  Other than sorghum syrup, the other topping they used throughout the South was something called Kero syrup.

• 42:38Speaker 16

  I've been eating Kero syrup ever since I was no higher than a baseball bat. Pour on plenty of Kero syrup, like I do. Nothing flavors a stack of cakes like delicious Kero.

• 42:50Speaker 17

  Yes, Mickey Mantle really goes for Kero syrup. Kero's dextrose food energy helps you star on any team.

• 42:57Nicola Twilley?

  Kero 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.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  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 caro marketing materials.

• 43:28Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 43:49Nicola Twilley?

  Eyes closed, because even as a kid, Casey knew clear syrup was just wrong.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  For me, I wanted to have this beautiful golden color. And we didn't have clear caro in my house growing up. This was only at my grandparents. And 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.

• 44:26Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 44:56Nicola Twilley?

  For Casey, there's literally only one answer to what is supposed to top a pancake.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  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.

• 45:09Nicola Twilley?

  And that syrup has to be maple. Ken agrees.

• 45:12Speaker 04

  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.

• 45:29Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 45:42Speaker 00

  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 Pancake, we were wondering, is a pancake a kind of cake?

• 45:54Speaker 03

  This feels like the, is it a sandwich? Question. It feels very loaded.

• 45:59Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  Pancakes, you know, are, I kind of put them in, if I had to make a spectrum. There's cupcakes on this other end.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  Like for a special celebration, maybe for your birthday.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  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, it's in this like lesser category of cake. So I celebrate every time I get to eat pancakes.

• 46:40Nicola Twilley?

  Thanks this episode to Casey Highsmith, Ken Albala, and Rishay Richardson. We have links to their work on our website, gastropod.com.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  Thanks also to our fantastic producer, Claudia Guy. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode. Till then.

• 46:56Speaker 07

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• 47:33Speaker 15

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you, based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.