How did the pancake hurt itself
Hot off the Griddle, Here’s the History of Pancakes.
Our prehistoric ancestors just may have eaten pancakes.
Analyses of starch grains on 30,000-year-old grinding tools suggest that Stone Age cooks were making flour out of cattails and ferns—which, researchers guess, was likely mixed with water and baked on a hot, possibly greased, rock. The result may have been more akin to hardtack than the modern crepe, hotcake, or flapjack, but the idea was the same: a flat cake, made from batter and fried.
Pancake Day: The Most Wonderful Day of the Year.
By the time Otzi the Iceman set off on his final hike 5,300 years ago, pancakes—or at least something pancake-like—seem to have been a common item of diet. Otzi, whose remains were discovered in a rocky gully in the Italian Alps in 1991, provided us with a wealth of information about what a denizen of the Neolithic ate. His last meals—along with red deer and ibex—featured ground einkorn wheat. The bits of charcoal he consumed along with it suggest that it was in the form of a pancake, cooked over an open fire.
Whatever the age of the primal pancake, it’s clearly an ancient form of food, as evidenced by its ubiquity in cultural traditions across the globe. The ancient Greeks and Romans ate pancakes, sweetened with honey; the Elizabethans ate them flavored with spices, rosewater, sherry, and apples. They were traditionally eaten in quantity on Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day, a day of feasting and partying before the beginning of Lent. Pancakes were a good way to use up stores of about-to-be-forbidden perishables like eggs, milk, and butter, and a yummy last hurrah before the upcoming grim period of church-mandated fast.
In the American colonies, pancakes—known as hoe cakes, johnnycakes, or flapjacks—were made with buckwheat or cornmeal. Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery —thought to be the first all-American cookbook, published in 1796—has two recipes for pancakes, one for “Johny Cake, or Hoe Cake,” which calls for milk, “Indian meal,” and molasses, the other for “Indian Slapjack,” which drops the molasses, but adds four eggs.
Thomas Jefferson, who was fond of pancakes, sent a recipe home to Monticello from the President’s House in Washington, D.C., picked up from Etienne Lemaire, his French maître d’hotel (hired for his honesty and skill in making desserts). Lemaire’s “panne-quaiques” were what we would call crepes—made by pouring dollops of thin batter into a hot pan. Modern pancakes—in Jefferson’s day known as griddlecakes—generally contain a leavening agent and are heftier and puffier.
Flat as a Pancake? Not Likely.
The defining characteristic of the entire vast family of pancakes, however—from crepe to griddlecake, blini, bannock, and beyond—is flatness. “Flat as a pancake,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary , has been a catchphrase since at least 1611. Usually it’s applied disparagingly to flat-chested women or to featureless level terrain, such as that of Poland, the glacial plains of Canada, and the state of Kansas.
In 2003, this recurrent comparison led a trio of geographers with senses of humor—after a dullish trip across the American Midwest—to attempt to determine the relative flatnesses of pancakes and Kansas. They constructed a topographic profile of a representative pancake—bought from the local International House of Pancakes—using digital imaging processing and a confocal laser microscope, and a similar profile of Kansas, using data from the United States Geological Survey. The tongue-in-cheek results, published in the Annals of Improbable Research , showed that though pancakes are flat, Kansas is even flatter. Where, mathematically, a value of 1.000 indicates perfect tabletop flatness, Kansas scored a practically horizontal 0.9997. The pancake, in contrast, scored a relatively lumpy 0.957.
In March of this year, Kansan geographers Jerome Dobson and Joshua Campbell—publishing in the wholly reputable Geographical Review – also took on pancakes, pointing out defensively that, while Kansas may be flatter than a pancake, it’s not alone. In fact, there are several states that are even flatter. Their calculations showed that, of the continental states, flattest of the flat is Florida, followed by Illinois, North Dakota, Louisiana, Minnesota, and Delaware. (Least pancake-like: Wyoming, West Virginia, New Hampshire, and Vermont.)
As all researchers hasten to point out, though, the pancake comparison simply isn’t fair. Blow a pancake up to the size of—say, Kansas—and you’ll end up with a fried expanse of ferociously rugged terrain, pock-marked with craters and canyons, studded with Everest-sized air bubbles. Compared to a Kansas-sized pancake—well, practically everything is flat.
The 16th-century measure of flatness was “flat as a flounder.”
How Badly Did the GOP Hurt Itself with the Tax Bill?
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It’s well worth reading John Judis’s essay raising doubt about how certain it is that the Republicans will suffer in the midterm elections, or even in 2020, due to the passage of their plutocratic tax bill. Even if you don’t agree with many or most of his points, you should at least consider them. So, why are the Democrats overly optimistic about their assumed political windfall?
Judis begins by asserting that “most American voters don’t object to inequality” unless “there is nothing in it for them.” We can debate exactly how true that is, but he points out that however skewed toward corporations and the rich the bill might be, there are some things in it that less affluent people will notice and appreciate, including “the increase in the child credit and standard deduction and lower rates.”
Judis predicts, with some justification, that people don’t really care about the deficit and that banging on about it isn’t necessarily sensible anyway—neither on the merits nor politically. And while he predicts that the bill will cause the same kind of irresponsible and unregulated speculation that caused problems in the 1920s and in the lead-up to the Great Recession, he feels that in the short-term, the tax bill will boost consumer spending and corporate investment and, consequently, the economy.
Judis acknowledges that the changes in how state and local taxes and mortgage deductions are handled will alienate suburbanites in high-tax states, but he see the resulting fallout as limited to the possible loss of a few extra House seats, with little benefit in other parts of the country or in statewide races.
Judis sees it as an optical problem that the individual cuts sunset in 2025 but the corporate rates do not, but he expects this to manifest as a political liability in 2025, not in 2018 or 2020.
Judis concludes by expressing skepticism about polling that shows that the bill is unpopular, as he doesn’t think it is an expression of substantive opposition to the features of the legislation.
I’m inclined to concede most of these points, but the areas where I disagree could be important.
Given that Donald Trump was just elected president, taking the cynical view of the American electorate might seem like an appropriate default position, but I don’t think it’s fair or supportable to say that Americans’ simply don’t care about wealth inequality. I think a lot of people care about it, and I believe it can be politically activated with or without demagoguery. During the Great Recession, Americans were being taxed at an historically low rate, but it proved easy to mobilize an impassioned political reaction based on the idea that we’re “Taxed Enough Already.” Complaints about fair treatment can still gain traction, and it’s even easier when the underlying grievance happens to be true. Hammering the Republicans for favoring the wealthy and corporations is always at least somewhat effective, but I think it will be especially effective in this cycle.
As to the breadth of the Republicans’ vulnerability in the suburbs, even if it is true that it is going to be limited, if it adds a few House seats to the Democrats’ column it could be the decisive difference between winning control of the House of Representatives and failing to do so. In other words, Judis could be right in his analysis of the impact but wrong in assessing the consequences.
I think it’s important that the bill is already unpopular, and that people are regarding it with deep skepticism. It’s true that they aren’t really reacting to the the substance of the bill. How could they when no one was able to read it and the provisions kept changing to the last minute? Their dissatisfaction is more an expression of their distaste for the process and their distrust of the authors of the bill and of the president. It’s also a reflection of who they currently believe when they read or watch the news, and the condemnations of this bill have been widespread in the mainstream media.
We saw something similar with the Affordable Care Act , where the bill was unpopular and a political liability for the Democrats who had voted for it. This, too, had to do more with the process than the substance, and also with who won the media war and what news sources the people chose to believe. It took several election cycles for Obamacare to become popular, and by that time the Democrats across the country had been decimated. So, a bill that starts off in a big hole is not likely to climb out of it on short schedule, and I doubt very much that people’s perceptions of this legislation will improve much between now and next November. The surest way for the bill to become more popular is for Trump and congressional Republicans to become more popular, and that just doesn’t seem like a good bet to make.
If Judis is correct that the immediate impact of the bill will be beneficial to an already booming economy, that will mitigate the damage to the Republicans to some degree. On the other hand, if the economy unexpectedly contracts, there’s no telling how ugly things could get for the GOP.
Overall, I think Judis is providing a worthwhile set of cautionary statements, but my guess is that the abyss is real—the only question is how deep it will turn out to be.