When we visited the Italian Alps back in June, my wife and I stayed in a small hotel in Ortisei. It’s ordinary but beautiful (and expensive). Ortisei looks like a quaint small town filtered through Alpine aesthetics: walkable, cozy, lovely, and inspiring a kind of deja-vu feeling from having seen reminiscent images in Christmas displays and on decorative plates.
Observant nerd that I am, however, one of the most striking things I saw there ended up being this wing of the dining room:
“I’ve seen this room before,” I instantly said to myself. It reminded me—again, that deja-vu feeling—of an old-school American family restaurant or pancake house.
On some level there isn’t much to it—exposed wood ceiling, homey tables and chairs, old-fashioned lighting fixtures and carpeting. Anybody could set up a dining room like this. But it’s a particular style that evokes an era of American family-oriented middle-class restaurants that are a vanishing breed, at least in the places I’ve lived. The sort of place I’m thinking of is distinct from a diner or just a breakfast-oriented restaurant. I’m specifically thinking about “pancake houses” (itself a sort of old-fashioned phrase).
And in the old Austro-Hungarian lands, pancakes are ubiquitous. We had them on our breakfast buffet here; the shredded pancake called kaiserschmarrn is very popular. American pancakes are said to be directly descended from British and Dutch pancakes. But there are continental European influences too, and Alpine and Nordic Europeans started or worked in American restaurants back in those days and brought recipes with them.
I’m thinking about this, in particular, because that dining room sparked an old idea for an essay. I remember reading some years ago, when I first started this newsletter, about a small local pancake restaurant chain in Northern Virginia called Three Chefs.
It’s nostalgic for older people who grew up here, and I saw comments like “Those were the best pancakes I ever had” and “No other pancakes are quite like those were.” Of course there’s nothing unique about pancakes in this respect; I came across another example of this, about frozen custard, having to do with the fact the older machines supposedly worked differently and produced a denser, creamier product.
Some people think this entire “Nothing tastes like that ice cream I had 60 years ago” sentiment is just nostalgia. Maybe it’s because your tastebuds have changed. Perhaps there could be subtle changes in theoretically fungible ingredients—milk produced today might just not taste 100% identical to milk from 70 or 80 years ago. Even with an identical recipe, there might just be some je ne sais quois that can never be entirely replicated.
But I remember one comment in particular—though it may have been about something other than Three Chefs—about a pancake recipe from a European chef, which included a number of different flours in a specific ratio to get just the right pancake.
This raises the possibility that