What are “pan cakes” exactly? My late Grandmother Jessie’s recipe – from her files I discovered this spring – was truly perplexing. This dish is one I certainly cannot recall ever having eaten.
Like some of my grandmother’s other recipes, this one is not much more than a list of ingredients. Most confounding for me was the lack of pan size, which might have revealed a bit more, e.g., round versus square or rectangular. The notes also have provisions for double the recipe.
However, what I found amusing was on reverse of the paper. It is a recipe from a downtown Los Angeles address. From a bit of Google-research, I could not find out what was at this address – a newspaper? Magazine? Television station? Initially, I figured it might have been the Los Angeles Times, as my late uncle (Jessie’s son) and my aunt were close friends with the publisher and his wife, which leads me to think that Jessie would have been reading it on a trip to California, perhaps in the 1970s from the typeface used. The recipe is a confusing one (read the “preparation” section) for some sort of seabass-asparagus terrine. I think I shall skip trying this recipe, however….
Given the citrus in this recipe, I thought of Jessie and her time spent in Florida, which was far more than her trips to California. My late grandfather was a sports writer and public relations specialist for sporting events, as I had described in an earlier post, and he covered the dog-racing season in Miami.
In this photo in Florida in the late 1940s, I suspect my grandfather might have taken the shot of my grandmother, mother, uncle, and my aunt (who had gotten a terrible sunburn and all was covered up here with a jacket and cap, on this visit which was right around the time they had gotten married).
For the cake failure then triumph and the recipe… Continue reading
