This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode When Is A Pancake Not A Pancake?, first released on February 24, 2026. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

SINGERS: What a breakfast! What a breakfast! International House of Pancakes. What a breakfast! What a breakfast! Your house of pancakes makes.

CYNTHIA GRABER: International House of Pancakes, one of the great American contributions to world cuisine.

NICOLA TWILLEY: No comment. But I do strongly agree that pancakes make a stupendous breakfast! Or lunch. Or even dinner.

GRABER: And pancakes are what we’ll be serving up this episode of Gastropod. That’s right, you’re listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history, I’m Cynthia Graber.

TWILLEY: And I’m Nicola Twilley. And this episode, there’s a lot to digest, as we tackle shocking allegations that latkes and Yorkshire puddings are actually pancakes. Yes, you heard me correctly.

GRABER: I know, I know, that battle is still to come. It all boils down though to that age old question that I know you all have spent years pondering: what makes a pancake a pancake?

TWILLEY: Moving from the philosophical to the historical, we get to the bottom of why anyone would want to put an image of a blackface minstrel show character on a box of what became America’s most popular pancake mix.

GRABER: All that, plus what should really be on the menu at the International House of Pancakes. Here’s a hint, it’s not what they’ve got now, and the pancakes are not something you’d want to top with syrup!

TWILLEY: This episode is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, in partnership with Eater.

[MUSIC]

KC HYSMITH: I’ve eaten a lot of pancakes. Pancakes were big in my house growing up. We ate so many pancakes. We loved going to diners. My first job was actually at a diner. I was a busboy. And so I ate a lot of pancakes there as well.

GRABER: KC Hysmith writes about food and food history, and after eating all those pancakes, she definitely knows what one is.

HYSMITH: So a pancake is, you know—it’s a cake that you, it’s, it’s a, it’s a very loose batter. We’re getting, if we’re getting scientific food sciency with it. And it’s, it’s very thin and it, and it cooks usually in a, a griddle. And it’s nice and flat.

KEN ALBALA: Distinguished from a bread, which is a dough, which you knead, and often is made with something that has gluten.

TWILLEY: That second voice, that’s Ken Albala, he’s professor of history at the University of the Pacific and he’s been on the show before, he starred in our Beans episode. He’s also the author of a short book all about pancakes.

GRABER: So according to Ken, bread has to have gluten, but pancakes just really need some kind of starch.

ALBALA: A pancake can be made of anything. So it can be made of acorns or chestnuts. Or teff, or rice, or anything. It really doesn’t need gluten at all. In fact, it’s better without it.

TWILLEY: Because for a pancake you want a batter, not a dough, you want something that you can pour onto your griddle or pan. Note: griddle or pan, not deep fat fryer.

ALBALA: I also defined it as something that’s fried in a very shallow amount of oil, because if you deep fry it, it’s going to come out very crispy.

GRABER: And if it’s super crispy it’s no longer a pancake, it’s a fritter. So how big should these soft, floppy, not-crispy pancakes be?

ALBALA: I don’t think there should be any size requirement. Because there are tiny little pikelets, you know, in New Zealand and in Scotland, they make like, little pancakes. And then there are enormous dosa, which you know, take up a whole plate or, or injera, which can be enormous platter size.

TWILLEY: That’s diameter, but what about height? Is there a mandatory minimum of aeration required to qualify as a pancake?

ALBALA: A pancake doesn’t—needs no leavening at all. In fact, it you could just use flour and water. And that’ll make a decent pancake. The fat will cause it to bubble the air inside. But you can use just eggs, which is a kind of historical way of way of doing it. The British still use just eggs. In the US we got in the habit of using leaveners, chemical leaveners. Baking soda and baking powder. Because you know, the acid combining with the alkaline creates these gaseous bubbles and it just makes a lighter pancake. And I think when Americans taste British pancakes, they think, this is really eggy and flat.

TWILLEY: Obviously I believe British pancakes are extremely delicious, but they are indeed quite flat. French crepes are pretty slimline too. But fluffy American pancakes are—shock, horror!—not the fluffiest!

HYSMITH: I know in Asia they go for these super fluffy, thick pancakes that are just crazy large. And they rely on a type of whipped egg white situation, and almost like a souffle-like imitation in their pancake.

ALBALA: So you can imagine whipping the egg whites first and then folding them into the batter. You can get a like six inch thick pancake that is light and fluffy. And really—and that’s my favorite pancake. It’s, it’s a pain in the neck to do, but it. It really comes out buttery and crisp on the edge and just light as a pillow inside. That’s magnificent.

GRABER: All those whipped egg whites do make it sound like a souffle! But Ken says there’s less flour in a souffle, and it goes even higher than the Japanese pancakes.

ALBALA: And the real difference is that souffle is baked.

GRABER: That’s key because as KC said, pancakes have to be cooked on the stove in a pan or on a griddle.

TWILLEY: But this is where the lines get blurry. Because Japanese souffle style pancakes are cooked in a pan, but they are also often baked a little too.

ALBALA: So I usually start it on the stove top and then put it in the oven to continue baking on top so it sets.

GRABER: Wait, what? I thought the whole deal was that pancakes are cooked in a pan—or on a griddle.

ALBALA: Well, it’s cooked in a pan first, and then it goes into the oven.

TWILLEY: Pinning down a pancake is clearly a tricky business. The starch can be anything, the leavening is not required, the oven can be involved. And, believe it or not, a pancake doesn’t have to be sweet.

ALBALA: Well, Americans do tend to think of pancakes as something sweet with maple syrup—usually artificial, unfortunately—poured on top of it. But I think savory pancakes are very—are much more interesting in some respects. You could put chives in there, you could put the bacon directly in the pancake. I think seafood in a pancake is a wonderful thing. Even a can of tuna. You know, mixed into the batter and just fried.

GRABER: That might sound a little odd to most Americans, but seafood is a common ingredient in the delicious savory Japanese pancake called okonomiyaki.

TWILLEY: Still, canned tuna in a pancake! Now we are truly coloring outside the lines. But Ken can’t be stopped.

ALBALA: There’s no limits in what it can contain. And of course, a crepe—you know, there are savory crepes that are just rolled around pretty much anything.

GRABER: This pancake definition is starting to feel a little expansive. So what is flat and starchy but ISN’T a pancake?

ALBALA: Well, we call the Chinese little pancakes that, that Peking duck goes in, we call them pancakes just ’cause they’re flat. But that is actually made of a dough. And it’s closer to a noodle really than it is to a, a pancake, because it’s not a batter. And a, a flat bread, like any bread, needs to have some gluten in it to keep the structure. Otherwise it’s going to be really, really… dreadful. You know, just tough and, and thick. Whereas a pancake can be made of any kinda starch at all. So, so a pancake is a lot more… diverse, let’s say, than a flatbread.

TWILLEY: I think we can all agree that naan and roti and tortillas are not pancakes. But I can’t imagine crispy Peking duck going inside anything other than pancake. Even if Ken says that is technically wrong because those wraps are actually made from dough, not batter.

GRABER: But then so what is a dough versus a batter?

ALBALA: Pretty simply, if you can pick it up, it’s a dough. If you can pour it, it’s a batter. I know that there are some really, really super hydrated doughs that, you know, are almost impossible to pick up. But that’s kind of the exception that proves the rule, that eventually you do pick that thing up. Do shape it by hand. You could never in any circumstances shape a pancake batter by hand.

GRABER: But that opens the door to things that are basically pourable batters before they’re cooked, but that I’ve never thought of as a pancake before. For one, Ken argues that latkes are pancakes. We eat latkes on Chanukah, and we fry them in a lot of oil. These are not pancakes, they’re fritters. But, well, when someone asks what latkes are in English, we do say they’re potato pancakes. Plus Ken says the pancake connection has to do with how you prepare the potatoes before you fry them.

ALBALA: There are two very distinct ways of making them. And the way I usually like to do it is I grate them and squeeze out all the water, take them in lumps, put them in—into a shallow pan of, of oil. And they get crispy. And those are really—they’re like hash browns more than anything. A lot of people, including the person I’m married to, makes them in the blender. They’re blended up with onions and they, they are literally a batter. And they’re poured into the pan. And it, they become a real pancake in that case. I don’t like them particularly, but. [LAUGH] But they’re—that’s the way she does ’em.

GRABER: OK so latkes *can* be made from a pourable batter. But the whole point is you’re supposed to fry them in a lot of oil to celebrate the oil that was supposedly found in the temple that kicked off what became the first Chanukah. They’re supposed to be crispy. So I’m still on team “not a pancake.”

TWILLEY: Ken is not content with disrupting Jewish pancake beliefs. He’s also coming for my ancestral non-pancakes. Such as that mandatory accompaniment to roast beef, Yorkshire pudding.

ALBALA: That’s a tough one. I think technically a Yorkshire pudding and a Dutch baby are pancakes. I think, they, they qualify because they’re batter. They’re cooked in a pan, even though they’re baked in the oven. They fluff up. But ultimately they’re just a big, fluffy pancake. Really.

TWILLEY: Ken! You’re blowing my mind! The savory, puffed-up crisp deliciousness with the pillowy eggy interior that you drown in gravy: he says that’s a pancake. And that’s not the only treasured British culinary tradition he’s coming for. Crumpets are made from a pourable batter and they’re cooked on a griddle, and I thought they were bread products, but Ken says nope.

ALBALA: So I would say that a crumpet is then a pancake. It’s just made in a mold.

GRABER: Most Americans though will not have had the pleasure of a crumpet, so, please: introduction time?

TWILLEY: You poor deprived people. A crumpet is an English muffin-sized bread product, sorry Ken. It has a slightly chewy texture, riddled with sponge-like holes that all the butter you slather onto it after you toast it trickles into in a most delightful way. And despite my firm belief otherwise, Ken says it’s a pancake.

ALBALA: Because it’s, if it’s a batter and it’s poured, and you’re not rolling it out like an American biscuit and cutting it and then baking it. If you’re pouring it in a pan, it’s a controlled, very tight British uptight pancake.

GRABER: Nicky, you and Ken can agree to disagree here. But as we’re touring the international landscape of pancakes, Ken says that you can find them everywhere.

ALBALA: As I’m thinking through the whole world, I’m, I’m hard pressed to come up with a place that doesn’t have a kind of pancake.

TWILLEY: Some of these pancakes are multipurpose. They serve as an edible plate and utensils combined. In South India, you get the dosa, which is a huge crepe made from a fermented batter of rice and black lentils, often served rolled up into a cylinder shape with the fillings inside.

GRABER: And in Ethiopia there’s what’s called injera. It’s large and spongy and flat, and you put all the other food you’re going to be eating on top of it.

ALBALA: Well, injera is an enormous pancake cooked on one side. But a lid goes on it, so it sort of steams the top. And it gets this lovely chewy kind of texture. And when it’s made of teff, it’s brown. And it’s sour because it’s actually fermented, naturally. And, the texture is lovely, and then you break off pieces of it or you use one of the injera as a sort of scoop. You know, you just take a piece of it and scoop the food up. But, that’s—that’s as good as food gets, I think.

TWILLEY: These are big sitdown pancakes, but in some places, pancakes are portable. Breton buckwheat galettes are crepe style pancakes wrapped around ham and cheese. My personal favorite pancake in the world is a classic Beijing street food breakfast, jian bing. It’s a mung bean and wheat crepe with an egg spread on it and lots of fun sauces, and then it’s layered with crispy wontons and folded up into a spicy, crunchy, savory, delicious package.

GRABER: Pancakes as street food are hard to find in the US.

ALBALA: But elsewhere it does work. Like a baghrir in Morocco is, is a, is a sort of little pancake. It’s only cooked on one side, so it has holes. But you’d find, you know, stacks of them sold and you’d just walk away with it in your hand.

GRABER: One winter in Florence, I stumbled across a market and there was a guy at a stand selling necci, which are warm chestnut flour pancakes. They’re nutty and toasted tasting, and they were wrapped around some kind of cheese and it was exactly what I needed on that chilly February day.

TWILLEY: Ken says the reason pancakes are universal is because they’re elementary. They’re likely one of the first starch based dishes humans ever made.

GRABER: People all over the world found that they could get a lot of nutrition from starchy things. And even before we domesticated crops like corn and wheat, we’ve been foraging as many starches as we could, and then boiling them or crushing them to release the nutrients.

ALBALA: So I imagine that the very first kind of pancakes would’ve been something like—imagine a Native American. And I’ll just picture the Yokuts who lived right where I’m sitting now in Central Valley of California. Taking acorns. Crushing them up in a, in a grinding rock. They took a, a, a water-tight basket, poured water into it, heated it with hot rocks, put into the baskets. And then they would put in the batter, the acorn flour goes into that. And it creates a kind of mush.

TWILLEY: This mush is acorn porridge. But looked at another way, it’s batter, just ready for the griddle!

ALBALA: And at this point, they take the mush, take it out, throw it onto a hot rock, and it becomes a pancake. You know, it’s, you know, it holds together. It’s, it’s it gets crispy around the edges. And so even before we have pans. I think there’s some kind of—obviously this was not prehistoric times, but, but I think it gives us a, sort of hint at how prehistoric hunters and gatherers would’ve eaten pancakes.

GRABER: World’s first pancake! Or proto-pancake.

TWILLEY: But for a dish that likely goes back so far, the pancake is surprisingly elusive in the written record. At least when it comes to actual recipes.

ALBALA: Well, this is really tricky. Because there are definitely people eating pancakes. ‘Cause they’re referred to in literature, and you know, people will say, cook this as flat as a pancake. Assuming the person knows what that is, even though there’s no recipe for it. There’s things very like, very much like pancakes. I mean, the word lacunta, which means in Greek, a flat cake, is something like a pancake. There’s no recipe, so we don’t know whether it’s a batter or a dough.

GRABER: And the reason there’s no recipe for these early pancakes is that actually for most of the pancake’s history, only poor people were eating them, and cookbooks didn’t include poor people food.

ALBALA: If you were wealthy enough, you would have a lot of fat. Lard usually, or oil. And you wanted your crisp to come out really crunchy. And so, if you didn’t have a whole lot of money, the last thing you would do is waste a whole pot full of fat. You’d use it for many other things.

ALBALA: So I think using very little fat in there gives you the soft pancake that we think of today.

TWILLEY: When the first pancake recipes do start showing up in cookbooks in the 1500s, Ken says they’re not actually pancakes.

ALBALA: I think there are some very close ones that sort of look like pancakes or called crepes that are made with a bowl that has holes in it. You pour the batter in and that goes into the fat. And then, and you can actually do that in very little fat, but it becomes crispy, and much, much more like a funnel cake. And of course, the word crepe comes from crisp, meaning it was originally a kind of funnel cake. It wasn’t a pancake at all.

GRABER: Pancakes or not, these definitely sound super tasty.

ALBALA: They’re usually made with wine, which I think evaporates as the, as the batter hits the fat. And so they are fluffy and really lovely.

GRABER: Ken says the earliest pancake recipe that’s really a pancake is in the “Good Huswife’s Handmaide for the Kitchen,” it was published in 1594. You can tell it’s floppy and not crispy because of the amount of fat.

ALBALA: ‘Cause it says take a lump of butter, the size of your finger. You know, that’s, that’s not a whole lot.

TWILLEY: Finally, a pourable batter-based pancake that was just pan fried, not deep fried.

GRABER: Ken has tried out a bunch of the earliest pancake recipes and some are better than others.

ALBALA: There’s one also that doesn’t work at all, which I found kind of amazing. It has a lot of cream in it and only like three teaspoons of flour, which—I, it just didn’t work when I tried to cook it. But the ones that do, the early ones are very, very eggy. They’re somewhere between an omelet and a pancake. And I think British pancakes are still that way. They’re still much more egg to flour ratio. And the egginess, of course, is cut—I mean Americans think of British pancakes, they say, what? You put lemon on it. That makes no sense whatsoever. An American would never in a million years put lemon on a pancake. It just seems absurd.

GRABER: This might not be how I would regularly consume pancakes, but I don’t know, it still sounds delicious to me.

TWILLEY: It is delicious, it’s not absurd at all, but what’s actually kind of weird is that we Brits only really eat these delicious lemon and sugar-dusted eggy crepe style pancakes once a year. On Pancake Day.

ALBALA: So Pancake Day is Shrove Tuesday.

TWILLEY: Neither Pancake Day nor Shrove Tuesday are going to be familiar terms for many listeners, and to be honest, I have always been more on the pancake eating side than the church-based shrove business, but the point is this is the day before Ash Wednesday, which is the official start of Lent in the Christian calendar, and you’re apparently supposed to be kind of clearing up the last dregs of carnival and confessing your sins so that you’re all ready for the forty days of grimness ahead.

ALBALA: In most places in Europe, there were fasting regulations, which said you were not allowed to eat meat or meat products which includes eggs, and butter, and milk, and cheese, and things like that. For that whole 40 day period leading up to Easter.

GRABER: And so there are traditions in lots of different countries about how to use up all those eggs and butter and milk. In England they used those ingredients up in pancakes.

TWILLEY: But we don’t just make and eat those pancakes, we also toss them, we fight for them, and we sometimes even run races while flipping them. The OG pancake race is in a little village in Buckinghamshire called Olney.

VOICEOVER: The parish Church of Olney in Buckinghamshire prepares for its big moment of the year, the Shrove Tuesday pancake race. The contest has been held in the village since 1445. [MUSIC] Only village women over 16 are permitted to enter. Pancakes must be tossed three times during the race, and the winner receives a kiss from the verger.

TWILLEY: A verger is a member of the clergy, not sure what they’re doing handing out kisses.

GRABER: Ken told us the legend that supposedly led to the very first pancake race.

ALBALA: There, there’s a story that the—the, the bell rings for everyone to go to church. And this woman is still cooking her pancakes and she says, I’m not abandoning them, abandoning them on the fire. I’m going to run right to the church and keep flipping my pancakes. So they have a race now to the church steeple with people, you know, flipping this pancake. And the idea is whoever gets there first, wins. But you have to continually flip as you’re running, which is a, a real trick.

VOICEOVER: And they’re off! From the marketplace to the church is 415 yards. A long way to toss a pancake. Halfway, the pressures begin to tell. The winner collects her check for 25 pounds in the frying pan. Where else?

TWILLEY: Who says British cuisine is boring?

GRABER: I’m not making that claim, at least not on air.

TWILLEY: But I must say, I do also like US style pancakes, possibly even more than British ones, although they are very different. The story of how the pancake became American, coming up after this break.

[BREAK]

GRABER: We said some of the earliest pancake recipes appeared in the middle ages. But the first pancake recipes that really seem more like today’s American pancakes come from the Netherlands in the 1600s.

ALBALA: And it may actually be that the Dutch introduced it into, you know, the New Netherlands and New York. So I think that may be—that may be a closer connection to where we got our light fluffy pancakes. And the Dutch love pancakes. I mean, it’s, they have pancake houses like we do.

TWILLEY: However they got to the US, what is clear is they have long been super popular here. Pancakes star in the very first cookbook written by an American and published in the United States. There are multiple different recipes, there are buckwheat pancakes, and some involve native ingredients like corn.

ALBALA: Early Americans did make them out of different grains. I don’t think many Americans would think of a corn pancake, or a rye pancake, or even a buckwheat pancake, even though that’s just as good as it gets, as far as I’m concerned. So people, you know, in places where you either couldn’t grow flour because of the climate. Or you didn’t have enough money for flour, which is the most expensive of grains. Pancakes are something you can make, out of absolutely any grains. So a combination of, corn and rye was very typical, which is a delicious, delicious combination.

GRABER: Even though these were more varied than our usual white flour pancakes today—and frankly these sound tastier to me, too—they were closer to what we eat now, they had become a recognizably American food.

ALBALA: Well, pancakes become lighter and fluffier and chemically raised. We start throwing things in them like blueberries or… chocolate chips or whatever. And, and you know, the American—I, I, it’s a cliche, but I think the whole idea of abundance, and choice, and big servings, you get a stack of pancakes. I mean, that’s, that’s a, a lot to eat.

TWILLEY: That heartiness is perhaps why a pancake breakfast became associated with lumberjacks and outdoorsmen and log cabins. They didn’t have box mix, but they could carry around a starter.

ALBALA: The idea is that if you’re a lumberjack, you carry around your sourdough with you. And that all you need to do is just scoop that out, onto the pan, and then add a little more flour, and it lasts forever and, you know, will be like a sourdough starter. Right? And I assume a lumberjack is out in the middle of nowhere in the forest, you know, you just make a quick fire. I don’t know how true that is. [LAUGH] You know, it probably comes from literature or popular imagination more than anything.

GRABER: One name for these early pancakes was flannel cake, because of the association with those flannel-clad bearded lumberjacks. But pancakes had lots of different names at the time.

ALBALA: Yeah. So there’s, there’s, you know, hoe cakes and no cakeS and flapjack. And, and those names are… almost meaningless. I mean, you know, people decide these crazy folk etymologies of them. The hoe cake supposedly was cooked on a hoe, you know. Which, [LAUGHING] which I actually tried.

GRABER: Of course you did.

ALBALA: And I made a fire outside. A hoe goes, you know, has a parallel right angle, so you’d have to hold it directly over the fire, in which case you burn your hands.

TWILLEY: Turns out there’s more than one kind of hoe.

ALBALA: No, the hoe actually refers to the pan. It’s just an old word for pan.

GRABER: And, as Ken said, another word in America for a pancake is a flapjack, which was a little confusing to me when my friend showed up from London and told me she had a flapjack in her purse for if she got hungry.

ALBALA: I was in England this summer and there’s a shop in… I was in Chichester. And it said, flapjacks. And I’m thinking, you sell pancakes here? It’s not, they’re, they’re like bars and it’s a totally different thing.

TWILLEY: The contemporary British flapjack is a dense, chewy cousin of a granola bar made of rolled oats, butter and golden syrup. No one seems to know how this term came to mean two such very different things.

ALBALA: No idea. No idea.

GRABER: Pancakes also became famous in America as one of the very first branded boxed mixes—and you’ll likely recognize the name of that very famous brand.

MALE ANNOUNCER: And remember, when you serve Aunt Jemima…

AUNT JEMIMA: Pancake days is happy days.

[SINGING]

RICHÉ RICHARDSON: Aunt Jemima emerged as a logo for ready-made pancake mix in 1889. And was used to market it, initially, by the two men who developed this image.

TWILLEY: This is Riché Richardson, she’s a professor at Cornell University.

GRABER: The two men Riché is referring to are Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood. Chris was a journalist and Charles was a millworker, and their story marks a darker turn in the pancake’s story. They started a new business that year, in 1889—they acquired a bankrupt flour mill in Missouri. And they were looking to disrupt the flour business.

TWILLEY: Neither of them was a cook or a baker, but no matter. At the time, mass produced packaging, in the form of paper bags, was new on the scene. And Chris and Charles had the idea of putting wheat flour, corn flour, salt, and a raising agent all together in one of these groovy new bags, so that anyone wanting a pancake could just add milk and drop the batter on a griddle.

GRABER: These two guys who couldn’t really cook decided to test their new product by having the local librarian over. He was a guy named Purd Writer—what a name—and when he tried their product he said they were very tasty flapjacks.

TWILLEY: But Charles and Chris still needed a name for their new pancake mix. And while he was pondering this, Chris went out to enjoy an evening at the minstrel show.

GRABER: Minstrel shows had already been around for a while at that point.

RICHARDSON: It spans at least back to the mid-1820s. And the legacy of Thomas Daddy Rice. As he was known. Who saw an enslaved person doing a dance called Jump Jim Crow. And he noticed that dance and adopted it and performed it. And it, it was increasingly popularized throughout the 1830s.

GRABER: By the late 1880s, when Chris wandered in for some entertainment, minstrel shows were everywhere. These were largely white people, white men, performing in blackface and also crossdressing for the female characters. There was lots of singing and dancing.

RICHARDSON: And so initially these performances appeared on stage, and theater, and were very much at the heart of American entertainment. And also the source for disseminating stereotypes of people of African descent that were very pernicious.

TWILLEY: One of the songs Chris Rutt heard, a super popular song originally written by a black musician called Bill Kersands, was the Aunt Jemima song.

GRABER: We don’t have any recordings from the time, but here’s a modern version.

SINGER: I went to de church de other night; Old Aunt Jemima, oh! oh! Oh! To hear de colored folks sing and pray. Old Aunt Jemima, oh! oh! oh!

GRABER: According to researchers, Kersands based his tune on a traditional field song in the South called “Promises of Freedom,” and the lyrics include a mistress who says she’ll free her slaves when she dies, including Aunt Jemima, but then she lives forever. That’s maybe why this song in particular was popular with both the white and Black communities at the time.

TWILLEY: And Chris Rutt liked the name Aunt Jemima, and he liked the minstrel show character it was referring to even more.

RICHARDSON: In the 19th century, there were these—these images that emerged again within plantation culture, and particularly within the plantation myth. So that the Black woman, for instance, was frequently represented as a mammy. And so the mammy figure, for instance, in, in, in terms of her physical appearance was typically represented as being plump. She was the epitome of the so-called happy slave. Delighted to serve the, the master class, her master and mistress, and to take care of their children.

GRABER: Remember this all was taking place after the Civil War had ended and slavery was officially over, but a lot of white Americans still had a nostalgia for the plantation days. And the mammy figure was beloved.

RICHARDSON: I think in part because it was a familiar image and it fed into the culture where narratives of the past and enslavement in particular, were premised on nostalgia and romance. And so this image was the epitome of that nostalgia.

TWILLEY: As part of this overall whitewashing of the Old South, plantation culture had come to represent a life of leisure and abundance and good food, for white people. And so all of those associations traveled with Aunt Jemima, too. Which to Chris Rutt made her the perfect image for a pancake brand.

GRABER: Chris and Charles created a new product called Aunt Jemima pancake mix. But it didn’t take off, and they went broke. They sold their mill and their brand to another guy in the milling industry named RT Davis. He added powdered milk to the mix, so you could literally just add water. And, at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, he hired a Black woman named Nancy Green.

RICHARDSON: Who was brought into literally flip pancakes in a giant flour barrel and proved to be a hit.

TWILLEY: Literally, this was a building shaped like a flour barrel where Aunt Jemima slash Nancy Green was serving up pancakes and in a world’s fair filled with fabulous buildings, and the world’s first ferris wheel, the flour barrel was it!

RICHARDSON: And so this began her long-term work. As the, you know, the human embodiment of Aunt Jemima.

TWILLEY: In real life, Nancy Green was a fifty nine-year-old servant who worked for a Chicago judge. She had been born into slavery on a plantation in Kentucky. But she got a whole new fake backstory as Aunt Jemima, courtesy of none other than Purd Wright, the taste-testing librarian. He created advertising copy filled with all sorts of made up stories about her life with new characters introduced.

RICHARDSON: You know, where you have this image of Colonel Higby, based in on a plantation in Louisiana, who is delivered time after time because of Aunt Jemima, whose pancake mix kind of saves the day.

GRABER: In one story that Purd wrote—and remember all of this is totally made up, there is no Colonel Higby and no real live Aunt Jemima. Anyway: Union soldiers threatened to rip the mustache off Higbee’s face. But Aunt Jemima offered the soldiers pancakes, and as they were enjoying themselves, Colonel Higbee escaped. Pancakes to the rescue.

TWILLEY: Aunt Jemima, the human-embodied brand, ended up becoming super, super popular. Nancy Green traveled the country, playing Aunt Jemima at fairs and festivals. People mailed in and paid actual money for a ragdoll version of Aunt Jemima and her made up husband and kids. And her fictional backstory was elaborated in endless ads.

GRABER: There was an Aunt Jemima radio show that lasted from 1923 until the 1950s, and she even was immortalized in an entire pancake restaurant at Disneyland in the 50s.

VOICEOVER: Try the Disneyland sensation. Aunt Jemima party pancakes.

SINGERS: My, they’re good.

VOICEOVER: And be sure to visit Disneyland.

TWILLEY: By this point, Nancy Green was long dead. She died in a car crash in 1923. And here’s what’s really bizarre: her obituaries describe her life story as if she was literally Aunt Jemima, a former slave whose pancakes made her famous.

GRABER: The whole Aunt Jemima story is wild, and obviously also, as we’ve been saying, is based on the racist stereotype of a Black woman as first enslaved and then as a servant. One thing that’s telling about the ads is that originally, there were never any white women in them. That way, they could kind of imagine themselves in the household with a Black woman working for them.

ALBALA: And I think for Americans—for some Americans post 19th century, they like the idea that a jolly heavy black woman was serving them food. And obviously that was someone doing labor for you. And the way they sold Aunt Jemima was saying, here she’s in a box!

TWILLEY: One book that tells this whole story is just titled Slave in a Box. Long story short, Aunt Jemima came to be synonymous with pancakes for a large swath of America. But there was one group she was never a hit with.

RICHARDSON: There’s been a longstanding critique of Aunt Jemima that’s played out over time.

GRABER: Back in the 1920s and 30s, it was already clear that many African-Americans absolutely hated Aunt Jemima. People wrote articles about the brand, they called for a ban of the pancake mix, but unfortunately none of that ended up putting much of a dent in her popularity. Quaker Oats, which had bought the brand, did eventually change her outfits.

RICHARDSON: You know, the bandana was ubiquitous. And then, you know, it came off and was replaced by the headband. I graduated from high school in 1989, and so that was literally a hundred years after the emergence of the Aunt Jemima logo. And in that year, the significant thing was that the headband came off. And Aunt Jemima was depicted wearing pearls, and so this was a more refined image associated with her.

TWILLEY: Unsurprisingly, this minor rebrand did not satisfy her critics. Public Enemy named and shamed Aunt Jemima in their 1990 protest song “Burn Hollywood Burn.”

PUBLIC ENEMY: And Black women in this profession/ As for playing a lawyer, out of the question/ For what they play, Aunt Jemima is the perfect term/ Even if now she got a perm.

GRABER: Still, Quaker Oats didn’t retire the Aunt Jemima label until 2020! It was too valuable as a brand.

RICHARDSON: There’s this sense of the Aunt Jemima pancakes being a kind of comfort food. And it is associated with very positive personal memories for some people. And so I think that that also explains the longstanding adherence to that image.

TWILLEY: But finally, after decades of protests and op-eds, including one written by Riché, Quaker Oats put Aunt Jemima out of her misery.

BROADCASTER: After a racial awakening, Aunt Jemima is getting a new name. Quaker Oats said the breakfast food brand will be renamed Pearl Milling Company and will launch in June.

GRABER: Long overdue. But before Aunt Jemima was permanently retired, she sold not only pancake mix, but pancake syrup too. And that leads to the question: what even IS pancake syrup? The answer, after the break.

[BREAK]

MAN: [SINGING] Oh, Log Cabin makes good syrups, about the best as anyone can; whether regular or butter, about the best friend in the land.

TWILLEY: We’ve already established that British people put lemon on their pancakes. But here in the United States other toppings reign supreme. Usually sweet ones.

HYSMITH: my mom always had peanut butter and brown sugar. She was not a syrup person. And I did not like that kind of intense combination. But I do love the, the weird little crunch that brown sugar does on top of a pancake, just a little extra—you know, more sugar on top of sugar. My, my dad didn’t like anything on his pancakes. So I think that’s also a little bit of an anomaly, especially in America. You know, just, just a dry pancake. He occasionally would put blueberries on top. Which seemed to be just like a, a dangerous, or not dangerous, but a… It seemed to be a very tricky thing to eat with blueberries running about.

GRABER: I agree with KC that peanut butter on pancakes is not a typical choice, and blueberries on TOP of pancakes is all wrong, they’re supposed to go IN the pancakes if you have them at all. A topping is supposed to be a liquid, really a syrup.

HYSMITH: So I’m a—I, and still to this day, my go-to combo is syrup with a sprinkle of brown sugar.

TWILLEY: And this syrup is called, in a very self explanatory sort of way, pancake syrup. As a kid, pancake syrup was a staple in KC’s home, for topping pancakes and more.

HYSMITH: Pancake syrup, also sometimes called table syrup, was used to pour on all sorts of things. Biscuits, all sorts of breakfast baked goods. But it was some kind of artificial sugar syrup, most likely high fructose corn syrup or corn syrup.It had some kind of artificial coloring, like caramel. The, the artificial, you know, caramel coloring that you find in so many products like sodas and stuff today. And then it would’ve had some other kind of natural flavorings, including some kind of maple, artificial maple, imitation maple flavoring.

GRABER: When KC was growing up, she had nothing to compare it to, she didn’t know if the artificial maple tasted anything like the real thing.

HYSMITH: We never had maple syrup. I don’t think I had maple syrup growing up until I was… at least in high school, maybe college.

TWILLEY: Gather round kids, we’re going back to the dark days of my and KC’s youth, when maple syrup was really expensive. I hear you, it’s not cheap today, but it is so much cheaper than it was. For me, growing up in England, it was super extra expensive because we don’t have the right kind of tree, and we had to import it.

GRABER: But even here, when I was a kid, it was really expensive, and we only had the fake stuff in the fridge. We have a whole Gastropod episode on maple syrup and you should check it out. But the short story is that two things eventually made maple cheaper: technology improved to get the sap out, and also, Canada broke up their maple cartel.

HYSMITH: The democratization of access to maple syrup has broadened wildly. Beyond my wildest dreams as a child.

TWILLEY: Even so, maple syrup still feels precious to KC. When her kids pour it onto their pancakes too generously, she can’t help but feel the pain.

HYSMITH: You know, I, I find myself wanting to like dip things in their plates afterwards because it feels so wasteful.

GRABER: Even back when maple was really expensive, it was still more common in New England and other regions where, you know, there were maple trees. In the south, they traditionally used sorghum syrup.

HYSMITH: Sorghum can be… not off-putting, but it is very distinct. It has a very kind of earthy flavor.

TWILLEY: This regional preference for sorghum dates back at least to the Civil War, when there were blockades and the South ended up relying on sorghum as a sugar substitute.

HYSMITH: They had a bunch of different substitutes. It was not the only one, but it was one that was readily available. And sorghum still grows readily in a lot of pockets of the south. And it’s not native to the south. But it’s an ancient grain that’s actually from Africa, and it’s theorized that it was brought over to actually feed enslaved peoples.

GRABER: Other than sorghum syrup, the other topping they used throughout the south was something called Karo syrup.

MICKEY MANTLE: I’ve been eating Karo syrup ever since I was no higher than a baseball bat. Pour on plenty of Karo syrup, like I do. Nothing flavors a stack of cakes like delicious Karo.

VOICEOVER: Yes, Mickey Mantle really goes for Karo syrup. Karo’s Dextrose food energy helps you star on any team.

TWILLEY: Karo was not originally developed to fuel baseball stars, it was launched in 1902 to use up some of the acres and acres and acres of corn waving their golden heads across the midwest.

HYSMITH: If you’ve never had it, it’s a very, very thick, it’s corn syrup. Basically. It is the basic ingredient. And it’s at its basic state clear. It wasn’t explicitly for pancakes, it was used in baking. In the south, a lot of us have pecan pie recipes. And a lot of our grandmothers have recipes that are taken directly from Karo marketing materials

GRABER: Karo has a few different versions of the syrup today, not just the clear one, but also a dark syrup and a medium colored one called pancake syrup. Her grandparents always used the clear one, though, on their pancakes.

HYSMITH: So you’d pour this clear, thick syrup that is thicker than molasses on top of your pancakes and, and eat them with your eyes closed. [LAUGH]

GRABER: Eyes closed—because even as a kid KC knew clear syrup was just wrong.

HYSMITH: For me, I—you know, I wanted to have this beautiful golden color. And, and we didn’t have clear Karo in my house growing up. This was only at my grandparents. And, you know, my parents at least had the dignity to buy— [LAUGH] They, they treated us well enough to buy artificially colored corn syrup. So that it didn’t look so weird. Because nonetheless, despite me never having had maple syrup growing up or having it so infrequently that I didn’t really know what it was, I knew that pancake syrup was supposed to be a certain color.

TWILLEY: Today, in the 21st century, brunch is a lifestyle, high fructose corn syrup is looked down on, and pancakes come with all sorts of trendy toppings. I’ve seen pancake stacks topped with such things as guava curd and pomegranate molasses.

HYSMITH: So I think that there’s a lot of really cool potential. And I know Food 52 did some fun toppings with, like, miso butter and different types of like, savory toppings. And those are all great, but I don’t think those are going to replace… like in our souls, what we want for pancakes.

GRABER: For KC, there is literally only one answer to what is supposed to top a pancake.

HYSMITH: Pancakes for me need to have syrup. And in my house, if we’re outta syrup, we’re not having pancakes. And we wait until we have more syrup.

TWILLEY: And that syrup has to be maple. Ken agrees.

ALBALA: Topping has to be real maple syrup. There’s nothing else for me, I think. And I usually like to actually dip it on the side. I think if you pour it right on top, it just soaks in and then everything is mushy by the end. So I have a little bowl of maple syrup and I usually eat it with my fingers, I have to admit. Ripping off pieces and just dipping it in is, is pretty great.

TWILLEY: I agree with the maple syrup decision, there is no other acceptable topping for an American pancake, but ripping and dipping pancakes with your fingers? Ken, we love you, but you’re an animal!

GRABER: Now that we have the topping question answered, there’s one final question we were left with. KC is currently working on a book about the history of cakes, and so given the name—pan…cake—we were wondering, is a pancake a kind of cake?

HYSMITH: This feels like the ‘is it a sandwich’ question? It feels very loaded.

TWILLEY: Here at Gastropod, we do specialize in the tough questions. In the course of her research KC has spent a lot of time thinking about cake and its meanings. To her, cakes mean celebration. And so the question of whether pancakes are a cake all comes down to the scale of the celebration.

HYSMITH: Pancakes, you know, are, are—I kind of put them in if I had to make a spectrum. There’s cupcakes on this other end.

GRABER: Like for a special celebration, maybe for your birthday.

HYSMITH: And then there’s pancakes that are down here that are every morning celebration. And so you have this—it’s still a cake, but it’s in this like, lesser category of cake. So I celebrate every time I get to eat pancakes.

[MUSIC]

TWILLEY: Thanks this episode to KC Hysmith, Ken Albala, and Riché Richardson, we have links to their work on our website gastropod dot com.

GRABER: Thanks also to our fantastic producer, Claudia Geib. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode, till then!