When I was growing up, my father didn’t cook all that much. He made excellent spaghetti on occasion. Once, when we had just moved into a new house, he cooked up a concoction of fried eggs on English muffins with American cheese over the top and told me the yolk was an eye and watched me watch him, fascinated, as he broke it with the tines of his fork. And every Sunday, he made pancakes.
I don’t remember when he started making pancakes on weekend mornings, and I certainly don’t remember when he stopped. In all likelihood, it was around the same time that we stopped watching One Saturday Morning on ABC, that we stopped going out to Long Island every weekend because we wanted to see our friends in the city instead of play endless games of make-believe in the backyard. I know that by the time I left home, pancake Sunday was no more than a memory, and in retrospect, I’m not sure how often my father actually made pancakes in the 14 years leading up to my departure. It could have been no more than 10 mornings, but those mornings made an impact on me.
The concept of “home” is one that I find very important, perhaps because, due to the peripatetic nature of both my parents’ and my own life decisions, home has always been more of an abstract term than a concrete place. Home has been our house on Long Island, a baker’s dozen apartments in New York City, a house on a hill in San Francisco. Home has been three dorm rooms with drafty windows in suburban Massachusetts, an en-suite apartment in downtown Toronto, a bedroom at the end of a hallway in San Sebastian, a downstairs flat in a finca in Mallorca, and no fewer than three — though possibly more — apartments within the city limits of Paris. But it’s more than that.
I remember visiting Paris in 2007, when I was still living in Cannes. One of the first things I did upon my arrival was to go to the 5th arrondissement and the St-Michel métro. The feeling I got when I popped my head up near the banks of the Seine, by the bouquinnistes I had perused with my father nearly ten years before was like coming home. And yet this wasn’t my home, not yet.
Paris has long felt like home. I don’t really know why. I didn’t feel the same draw here that my mother felt, even once I had visited Lille and the North and fallen in love with the language. I liked Paris, but I didn’t feel drawn here. My love for Paris crept up on me, slowly, as my unrequited love for New York faded away. I had carried the torch for my native city for years, all through boarding school and my first two years of college, making it out to be far more romantic a city than it ever was in reality, at least to me. Paris took me by surprise, a city that would allow me to be in my beloved France, for it was this characteristic and no other that brought me here.
Now I find it strange that it was Cannes that brought me to Paris, where I’ve lived so long that Cannes almost seems like a dream instead of a fact of my past, a place that has only ever been memory. Perhaps it’s because Paris has had the time to build itself up again and again, to be simultaneously past and present, renewing itself over and over again over the course of the past six years. If there’s any neighborhood for which this is even more true, it’s without a doubt Montmartre.
Montmartre is the neighborhood I take everyone to visit, the part of Paris that I beg visitors to take a day to explore. I know it by heart by now, except that I don’t. Every time I visit this winding portal of a hill, I start in one direction and end up falling in another. Chalk it up to my poor sense of direction; I can’t help but love it.
I brought my sister to Montmartre the other day, and we ended up discovering new cobbled passageways and beautiful houses with lilac shutters, a doorbell you’d buzz if this were fiction, but as it isn’t, I contented myself with a snapshot.
Montmartre beckons, no matter how long I’ve lived here. Perhaps I’m glad, now, that I didn’t get that apartment I coveted in Lamarck-Caulaincourt. Would Montmartre have lost its charm if it had ever become my reality?
Perhaps not. I know of no other place that combines the fantastic and the authentic in perfect balance, a place that calls out to me in a way that feels like destiny, where graffiti is signed by Victor Hugo, and a white steeple casts its shadow on you wherever you stand.
All this to say: home reinvents itself. It’s done so several dozen times for me already, and I can’t help but expect that it will do so another hundred times before I’m through. Today, home means pancake day in our little apartment in the 15th. I don’t remember when our version of this tradition started, and The Country Boy is quick to remind me that it’s a tradition that is far from regular. But there’s something nice in the automatism that is a lazy Sunday, a recipe I now know by heart, the sun slowly flooding our living room, letting morning fade easily into afternoon as we enjoy pancakes with maple syrup and fried eggs, the way my dad likes them, though he never made them that way for me.
Pancakes with Fried Eggs
Note: I like blueberry pancakes; TCB prefers plain. This is how I cater to both.
1 1/12 cups flour
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1 Tbsp. vanilla sugar (or 1 Tbsp. sugar and 1 tsp. vanilla extract)
1 egg
1 1/4 cups milk
1 Tbsp. melted butter
cold butter for greasing the pan
1/2 cup frozen blueberries
Place a skillet over medium heat and allow it to preheat.
Combine the flour, baking powder, salt and vanilla sugar (or granulated sugar) in a medium bowl.Â
Make a well in the dry ingredients and add the egg, milk and vanilla sugar. Stir to combine, but no more! Drizzle in the melted butter and stir just until combined.
Place a small lump of cold butter in the skillet. Allow it to melt.
Use a table spoon (not the measure, an actual large spoon) to make pancakes: two spoonfuls per pancake should do it. I make three at a time. Drink coffee and watch them closely. When bubbles start to form at the surface, flip them. Cook until golden brown on both sides. Eat one; place the other two on a plate and keep them in the oven so they stay warm. Continue making pancakes until you have enough plain ones. You’ll need to add more butter every batch or two.
To make the blueberry pancakes, start by adding 1 1/2 spoonfuls of batter. Then top with a few blueberries (as many or as few as you like; I like a lot). Top with another spoonful of batter. Cook til bubbles form, then flip, continue cooking, and serve with maple syrup and fried eggs.