Pour It On

I think it was my mother who taught me socialist saucing.

Every time we had pancakes my mother would exhibit her prowess. Mom would put just enough syrup on each flap jack so that they would all be equally ensconced with sappy sweetness. Mom’s pancake habits were particularly notable to me as a child because she used one of the most coveted substances in the entire house: maple syrup.

Mom was the only person allowed to use the obviously superior sap while my brother and I were relegated to lower rungs of the syrup isle shelf. This rule was unspoken, but remains in tact despite the fact that my brother and I have since become adults. To this day there are always two bottles of syrup on the table, no matter who may be dining over.

But not all my childhood influences swayed me into socialist saucing. If Mom was the table socialist, Dad was the Democrat. Our parents divorced while my brother and I were very young and we got used not only a routine visitation schedule with Dad, but also some routine meals, especially Sunday breakfast. Every Sunday was the same: biscuits, hash browns and eggs. So rarely did it deviate from the norm that I could make the full meal by age 10.

After we said grace, Dad would reach first for the butter and then for the syrup bottle and promptly drown his biscuits in Butterworth’s. He may as well have been eating from a bowl as a plate. The problem was not that volume of syrup equaled more than mass of biscuit, it was that liquid content on the plate was greater than any solid food at all.

Interestingly enough, I seem to have fallen into cahoots with another male of similar characteristics. While my fiancée’s love for his guitar and good art are alike enough to those of my father, his compulsory smothering of any food group is the excess icing.

Soon after we moved to San Francisco, we went food shopping. It was the initial restock-on-everything trip to the grocery store. Of course, syrup was included. My fiancée, being a thrifty individual was more than skeptical as I looked past the bottom shelf syrups and cast my gaze on gold-medal-winning maples. “It’s so expensive,” he said. “But it’s so good,” I said, and took my prize from the shelf.

Later that week we made pancakes.