24th
Batter Blaster
In the Roman province of Judea, in the Year of our Lord the Sixty Sixth, the local people began a tax revolt that lasted for six long years and included the destruction of Jerusalem, the mass suicide of the defenders at the fortress of Masada, and the Diaspora of the Jewish people. In that perilous age, there often was no time to prepare a normal breakfast and the population was forced to use pre-made pancake batter stored in pressurized gourds sealed with beeswax. While these pancakes did assuage the people’s hunger, they were filled with bitterness and to this day the Jewish people, when forced to resort to such drab fare, refer to them as the “Cakes of Atonement.”
Near the end of the American Civil War, when the Union Army of the Potomac was closing in on the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, supplies in the trenches around Petersburg were scarce. Breakfast often consisted of plain corn meal fried in grease and the men were glad to get it. On Christmas Eve morning in 1864, hoping to give the stalwart defenders a treat, Confederate commander General Robert E. Lee presented his weary soldiers with a breakfast of flapjacks smuggled through the Union blockade from France. The batter had survived long months at sea in weevil-infested barrels pressurized with compressed air, but many of the barrels had leaked and the batter had spoiled. The men were so hungry and cold that they ate the cakes, but called them “Lincoln’s handkerchiefs” because the baked-in weevils looked like gobbets of snot.
Today, in an effort to save time on a busy Christmas Eve morning, my sister made pancakes from the modern version of this hardscrabble fare, to wit, the “Batter Blaster.” Delivered under pressure by a can resembling that of whipped cream, the pancake batter is sprayed onto a hot griddle where it proceeds to bubble and congeal into something that resembles a pancake but in fact is actually a material similar to the undergarments of astronauts forced to wear the same spacesuit for days on end. I imagine it tastes the same anyway.
From the “Cakes of Atonement” to “Lincoln’s handkerchiefs” to “Batter Blaster” the busy breakfast tradition continues. America is going to need that health care bill, and soon.
