It took less than a year to perfect vegan pancakes. I grew up reading Tommie Di Paola’s Pancakes for Breakfast, in which an old woman collects eggs, milks cows, and churns butter to feed her craving for a thick stack of pancakes. The only words in the story are read over the shoulder of the woman as she looks at the recipe in her cookbook. It was this recipe I grew up on and this recipe I would not quit.
A vegetarian for eight years and a vegan for three, I excelled at quitting. And being a bit of a gourmand, veganism became the tricky business of aligning ethics and taste buds. But before the substitutions, I had to quit cold turkey. Literally. I also quit burgers and fries and hot dogs at ballparks. I quit Thanksgiving dinner and my mom’s chocolate chip cookies. Still, few omnivores understood. Who likes to watch someone else abstaining? I had quit my leather belts, my dress shoes, my hiking boots, my soccer cleats, and my leather bound journal. I had quit Domino sugar and Sam Adams with their supposed ground bone and fish oil (respectively) in the processing. Over time, though, I began to work my favorite foods back into my diet with the big question of how to make comfort foods taste normal.
In this spirit, I tackled Pancakes for Breakfast with gusto. First, the recipe, which took much experimental substitution—oil for eggs? Bananas? Soy milk for dairy? Potato starch egg replacer? After a few months I perfected pancakes that fluffed and stacked and looked, well, like real pancakes. Then I attacked the text, and with great precision I whited out the offending milk, eggs, and butter, and adapted the book for my vegan boyfriend. He never seemed to appreciate the gift. Perhaps that’s because I didn’t white out the cows and the chickens doing their part for the old lady’s breakfast.
Pancakes had been redeemed, but my taste for quitting had only been whetted. I soon quit my city, my apartment, my cat, and the boyfriend. After quitting some possessions, I moved to Boston where I realized I might need to relax, if not quit, the quitting. People couldn’t figure out what I ate thus didn’t invite me to dinner. It seemed I quit socializing. After a year, I threatened to quit Boston for good, and quitting my new apartment, I drove to Northern Maine. I ended up at a cabin in the woods without electricity. I stumbled along a trail wondering who I was and what I had left.
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All that changed with Guy. I had taken a brisk walk down the trail, and returning to the cabin, I pushed open the screen door to see a lanky shadow from floor to ceiling by the sink. His hello was short, but then he turned, wrist deep in suds and looked at me with a grin that hung loosely from check to cheek as if it had been there his whole life. “Would you like some cornmeal pancakes?”
What kind of person says no to such an offer? The stands and statements, the renunciation and hunger for distinction raced through my mind. “Vegan” spelled out in old English across my ex-boyfriend’s shoulder flashed like tickertape across my mind. I watched Guy crack five eggs into a bowl. He pulled whole milk from the propane-powered refrigerator. Pushing the crowd of gaunt activists back to New Jersey (a state everyone talks of quitting but where few succeed) I did what I do best. I quit. “Yes,” I said, “pancakes would be great.”
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Quitting by assuming was a whole new world for me. Quitting veganism, the most conservative diet I had yet encountered (thank God I hadn’t discovered macrobiotics), opened the floodgates. I quit vegetarianism with lobster I had driven inland from coastal Maine. Guy had begged me for them, his one souvenir from my weekend jaunt, and he promised they’d be packaged up tight. Instead the woman gave them to me as one might a puppy to the parents of a small child. As they skittered around in the bottom of the cardboard box for the four-hour car ride, I realized my role as an enabler and Guy’s as consumer differed by only taste. After clicking shut the screen door, we set our picnic table with candles and kept the gas lamps burning low while we feasted on boiled lobster and pasta coated with a buttery sauce.
I awoke every morning to a fried egg sandwich just off the griddle, and our days working for the state park led to a life both of abdication and assumption. My kayak flipped on a calm lake and I soaked (and thus quit) my cell phone, alarm clock, and camera. Guy walked me through these changes, continually making meat available with no guilt and little pressure. Our utterly platonic relationship let me experiment with ease. His rural gate, easy on long trails and at odds with the pulsing streets of Bangor, encouraged me to lengthen my stride, quitting my anxious movements for a long, steady pace.
The job ended as the heat of the summer waned into a cool fall. As I headed back to Boston, Guy packed his pick-up for Western Pennsylvania. I heard from him a year later, a month or two before he married his high-school sweetheart, Wilma.
Pancakes for Breakfast is not only a sweet tale of the source of pancakes. After the woman has collected the ingredients and mixed them together, she remembers that she needs maple syrup. Upon returning, she opens the door to find milk spilt, eggs broken, and her batter-covered dog and cat sitting amid the mess. Their innocent eyes beg the question, “What could we have done wrong?” Her hope is destroyed, and she hangs her head in resignation. But wait, all is not lost. Through the open window she catches a whiff. No, it couldn’t be. Knocking on the neighbors front door, she enters and to their bewilderment she joins them at the table for a thick, golden stack.
More pleasure comes from sharing than from rampant substitutions. When living ethically led me to eat alone, I realized no food could fill my hunger for community. The old woman knew her hen, her cow, and most importantly, her neighbors. No amount of straight-backed individualism trumped eating Guy’s cornmeal pancakes, no matter how many batches of vegan pancakes I could make for myself.
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Christine Evans has had a busy summer. She finished graduate school, got married, farmed, and wrote and wrote and wrote. She also edited the crap out of her friends’ writings.
