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[pancakes-discourse]

fish requests #1 :-D

[pancakes-discourse]

Peanut butter-chocolate cookies (Issaddaa Ekanis)

Rich, chocolatey, peanut-y, these fancy cookies surprise by getting by entirely with no flour and yet are extraordinarily quick and easy to make, if you can get all the ingredients.

This recipe is flexible and made by sight, so don’t worry about not having the exact amount of most things, your cookies will likely turn out great regardless.

R E C I P E

2 eggs

peanut butter

chocolate cream or spread, enriched with nuts or not

white sugar

salt

(optional: spices like cinnamon, vanilla or ground coriander seeds )

(optional:

Utensils:

pot or bowl for mixing

spoon or mixer

baking dish

baking paper

oven

fork or toothpick

Directions:

1. Crack eggs into a pot or bowl, mix in the peanut butter and chocolate cream. The exact amount can vary a lot, just make sure to add enough peanut butter to have a good, viscous dough at the end. Use a spoon or mixer.

2. Add plenty of sugar (at least four-five tablespoons) and mix it in well. The amount will naturally vary based on how much peanut butter and chocolate cream you added in the first step. If you added a lot, increase the amount accordingly.

3. Add salt (a pinch or two), and spices (ideally mix with an equal amount of sugar first)

4. Pour onto a pan, attempt to leave enough space between the cookies since they will likely expand horizontally. But you can also try to make one giant cookie.

5. Bake in an oven at about 180 °C or alternatively 375 °F until the edges start getting crispy and a fork or toothpick comes up clean.

H I S T O R Y

One thing I didn’t realize how even among neighbors such basic things as hospitality can differ greatly.

In Lufasa, owing to Jutic heritage, anyone receiving guests is supposed to display “restrained generosity”, i.e. to provide a warm welcome and provide enough and good food, but to avoid embarrassing or overwhelming guests it’s meant to be a limited amount more akin to a weekday dinner rather than a feast.  And in turn, guests are expected to bring food to share, too, in the spirit of friendship and cooperation.

A big shock for me when moving to Gfiewistan was that if anything the visitor is the one expected to bring food, especially when visiting someone of high status, apparently originally justified as needing to honor them and showing appreciation for their "generosity", which was of course often more a claimed rather than a real thing, like the “generosity” of the Gfiewish monarchs and priests in in Lufasa during pre-revolutionary times.

After the republican revolution and the nominal abolition of titles of nobility and transition to a more openly socioeconomic class-based society this became more a display of the visitor’s status: You showed your wealth and amount of self-reliance by not relying on the food of the host, but bringing your own food with more than enough to spare for the host

The host in turn showed off their wealth by providing an impressive location, with fancy furniture, tablecloths and the food they were eating (a comparison I think would be the way you can signal your status and the kind of person you want to be seen as by ordering specific things in a restaurant)

One of the most popular foods to bring were and are cookies: easy to transport and more shelf-stable, but can be stuffed full of expensive ingredients such as eggs and flour (mostly restricted to the nobility until the industrial revolution), butter, spices, fruits (especially in the south)

As the industrial revolution cheapened flour, the ratio of flour to other ingredients changed and cookies became fattier and richer.

Peanut butter when it arrived in the 19th century from Cananganam first had the reputation of being a subpar butter replacement, but became hugely popular as ingredient once it was discovered that it worked perfectly in cookies, and so-called Cananganam Cookies (Enkananganamkos Ekanis, or short Enkananis) are still a staple of any bakery or home-baker, as peanut butter is easy to transport and supremely shelf-stable, lasting for years if properly stored, is rich and fatty, flavorful (and in an exotic way) and due to its relatively high carbohydrate content can also be used to reduce the amount of flour in cookies.

As a result, fancy cookies came to be distinguished by their relatively low flour content – even today those described as "bready" and having a lot of flour typically still might seem unusually fatty. They are popular as gifts, snacks and breakfast or travel food. The most popular cookies are buckwheat-peanut butter cookies ("Cananganam cookie") and the traditional "Juniper" cookies. 

Even fancier than these peanut butter cookies are chocolate-peanut butter cookies (Issaddaa Ekanis) that do away with the flour entirely and replace it with a kind of chocolate cream, often further enriched with nuts and exotic flavoring like vanilla. They are also my favorite treat, easy to make at home and delicious to eat with friends in cafes, too.

[pancakes-discourse]

Lufasa-style pancakes (Kementsa honeç /  Mestanixbun)

Quick, easy and delicious since immemorial times! Fits with almost everything during everything, but particularly great to share with guests and friends. The long history of this quintessential dish can be found below the recipe.

R E C I P E

Eggs (2 per person for a meal, 1 for a small snack)

Milk (about 40 ml or 0.15-0.2 cups per egg, coconut milk needs thinning first)

Flour (any starchy flour except for nut/seed flours should work, at least 40 g or two slightly heaped tablespoons per egg)

Spices (optional, e.g. cinnamon, cardamom, ground coriander seeds..., half a teaspoon each per egg)

Salt (optional, ½ teaspoon per egg)

Sugar (optional, either the same amount as the flour or half, as desired)

Oil (sunflower or any other vegetable oil suitable for frying) or butter

Utensils:

Bowl or pot

Pan

Stove (or campfire)

Spoon

Spatula (a flat cheese slicer works, too, but be careful not too scratch the pan)

Ladle (optional)

1. Mix all the ingredients except for the oil in a bowl or pot. Use a spoon, whisk or mixer. The result should be a thin batter with no clumps.

2. Add oil to a pan, and tilt the pan to cover the surface, but only barely. Heat it on the highest level (electric stove) or medium-high heat (induction stove) until you can feel the heat emanating from the pan. Add a ladle full of batter (or carefully pour batter from the bowl or pot) to the pan and spread it evenly, gently tilting the pan in all directions as necessary so the entire surface is covered.

3. A Kementsa pancake typically needs less than a minute to cook from one side. Keep your attention to the pan at all times and use a spatula to carefully flip the pancake.

To do so, first try to scrape the edges of the pancake free with the edge of the spatula, then gently insert it below the edge and push it further below the pancake until the pancake is entirely unstuck from the bottom of the pan and covering the spatula. Then, lift it into the air and flip it quickly by twisting your arm.

If the pancake falls apart into two or more parts in the process, flip these separately.

4. Finish cooking the other side and gently slide onto a plate.

5. Repeat until you have as many pancakes as you want or need.

6. Offer toppings. The most traditional and also still the most common ones are berry jams, curd cheese and beet sugar syrup, or any combination thereof, but almost anything goes well with them.

If you added spices and sugar to the batter, a chocolate or nut spread is amazing.

However, these pancakes are also great plain with just sugar (or sugar and cinnamon) sprinkled on them.

H I S T O R Y

Origin as thick pudding

When I first arrived in Hatariew, the capital of Gfiewistan, some years ago I quickly noticed all the stands, bakeries and fast food places selling something that seemed to so closely resemble something I knew from home, and upon trying one I realized that they were almost exactly like the pancakes I had grown up eating in Lufasa.

It turned out that my homecountry was actually the origin of them and that Gfiewish people had adopted the recipe centuries ago during the time they occupied the lands.

Although the history goes back further, with a predecessor of this dish coming from a much further land. Ancestors of modern-day Lufasans on the tropical island of Jute, who had no concept of modern frying, had apparently once eaten a pudding of grated breadfruit, coconut milk and guineafowl eggs wrapped in palm leaves and steamed in pits, with hot stones put on top and on three sides. Oral tradition then states that about 2,000 years ago they had to flee to Ystel to escape war in their previous home.

This means that they had traveled thousands of km down the Saru Sea and then down the Ersaj river to the capital of Gfiewgjknsiorjgiostan, a much colder place than where they had eaten their pudding before. At this place, the traditional ingredients were of course not available, so alternatives had to be found, including for the steaming process.

The neighboring Maponic people in the area were already growing millet at the time, and its starchy nature made it the replacement for breadfruit. A second alternative, buckwheat, eventually arrived from the south. A key difference was that unlike breadfruit, where you can simply mix the mushy pulp of the ripe fruit with other ingredients, millet and buckwheat come in groats that have to be ground into flour first. This was done manually, in a time-consuming process, as mills were not yet invented here.

Coconut milk, traditionally the liquid in the batter, was replaced by juices (mostly berries), herbal teas or later by sunflower seed milk. Those refugees that traveled further south and would later become Lufasans soon entered into close contact with Gfiewish cultures, and became exposed to ovine milk. However, lactose tolerance had not yet spread in the population, and so it was not commonly used until much later. Even now, a “milk belt” goes through the country, with South Jute to the north and Gfiewistan to the south.

With no guineafowl, eggs had to be scavenged from wild birds and seafowl, making them much more difficult to acquire and hence a very expensive ingredient. In the 1300s chickens were brought in by an overseas empire to Ystel, although for Lufasans and Gfiewish people they remained mostly limited to wealthy and aristocratic households until the late 19th century.

Attempts to adapt the steaming process to local plants also failed because no leaves were anywhere large enough as the palm leaves used before.

As a result, the pudding began to be cooked in flat earthenware on a fire, as stones alone in the colder climate didn’t provide enough heat to cook it fully as they cooled off too fast, especially in colder months. The stones were instead surrounding the fire now, resembling the fire pit already used by the ancestors on Jute to cook soup and roast fish. Stirring was meant to ensure equal cooking.

Development of the modern buckwheat pudding and pancake

However, the pudding sticking to the bottom of the cookware even with continuous stirring proved to be a nuisance. Several ways to deal with this issue were subsequently developed.

One featured revising the recipe to boil the liquid first and only later add the other ingredients while continuously stirring, which eventually gave us what is still known today as buckwheat pudding. The eggless variant became the most popular, as eggs remained expensive until the egg rent imposed on farmers that had led to most eggs be sent to the nobility was repealed after the republican Revolution in Gfiewistan in 1852.

Another method featured various attempts to create an isolating layer between cookware and food that could nonetheless still carry heat. Eventually, an ingredient they had recently been introduced to by their Maponic neighbors, sunflower oil, came to be used. It was extracted with significant difficulty from locally growing sunflower seeds and heated in the pot before the mixture of other ingredients was added. People living south of the “milk belt” would later also use ovine milk butter, which there was easier to obtain. This method had some mixed success, while the pudding could be removed more easily, it now always had a fatty film below it that had to be absorbed with a cloth.

A different problem was that cooking in hot earthenware pots can break more easily, sometimes dramatically. With the advent of metallurgy, introduced to Lufasa by South Juteans from the north, metal pots began to be used, which could withstand damage and be heated to a much higher temperature before violently exploding. Some were rather flat, much more than the flattest earthenware used before, and handling them could be dangerous, as hot oil could more easily splash. For safe use, long handles were soon added to the flat pots, and so frying pans had been invented. The new cooking method of frying allowed for entirely new foods.

Oral tradition narrates a legend of how this led to the invention of pancakes: A cook left with only pans rather than pots used normally for pudding was annoyed at being forced to use a lot less ingredients at a time, but as he saw that this allowed him to cook them much faster. And with the oil getting hotter and being spread more evenly, there was no unappetizing fatty film, but rather an enticing crispy layer giving the food a distinctive flavor, which could easily be replicated on the other side of the food by flipping it once, something that would have been impossible in a deeper pot.

These first pancakes quickly became very popular, and as a result, the old methods were mostly left behind, leaving the buckwheat pudding the only one still widely eaten. Pancakes spread quickly across not just Lufasan lands, but also across all of northern Ystel, with every region developing its own variant, such as the millet pancakes of South Jute.

Due to this the original pancakes are nowadays often called Lufasa-style pancakes, but I knew them as kementsa honeç (Lufasan for “moonshine” or “moon meal”, referring to their circular shape resembling a full moon) and in Gfiewistan I have also seen them be called mestanixbun (“made of buckwheat, made of egg”), alluding to the original main ingredients.

Historical occasions for pancake eating

Since the ingredients (buckwheat flour, berry juice, eggs, sunflower oil) were originally much harder to obtain than the original ingredients on Jute, these pancakes were historically mostly only eaten on very special occasions. This remained true even once flour and oil mills came into existence, as especially the former was restricted to the Gfiewish nobility and wealthier merchants. Only with the industrialization in the early 20th century that made both widely affordable did this change.

One of the occasions of which they were an inseparable part of is the most important Lufasan celebration when you are no longer a child and move out of the home of your family that has brought you up and join a new one, traditionally to raise children of your own. If feasible, both families celebrate the event together, one emphasizing how you are now a mature adult, the other  celebrating to make you feel welcome as a new family member. Alternatively, if the families are too far apart or can’t come together for other reasons, you will participate in two separate celebrations. These celebrations usually take place during the night, ideally during a full moon, during which many kementsa honeç are served.

Gfiewish nobles apparently picked up the custom for their banquets and started milling buckwheat in large amounts, and much more finely than any Lufasan person managed to do with their hands.

To this day, coarse buckwheat flour is much more popular in Lufasa than fine white buckwheat flour and it’s what I’m familiar with. There’s even coarse buckwheat flour with added buckwheat shells for added fiber commercially available, said to be a remedy for various ailments. The widespread availability and low prices have turned the formerly very festive food into something that is much more commonly eaten and can quickly be whipped up even when a visitor comes by unexpectedly.

However, nowadays corn flour is also widely used in both countries, but especially in Gfiewistan. This is why I selected corn flour moonshine as the first recipe on this blog. Not only is it the historical ancestor to most pancakes on Ystel, and itself also still is one of the most famous foods on the continent, it is also a new twist on the pancake I grew up with and the first I made in Gfiewistan.

People from southern and western Gfiewistan in particular might disagree it’s the best kind, but if it weren’t for it, many other popular variations wouldn’t exist either, and my new friends from college enjoyed it a lot.

[pancakes-discourse]

Welcome to Pancake Discourse

Recipes for Gfiewgjknsiorjgiostan (often shortened to Gfiewistan) and other Ystelian pancake variations, pancake-inspired foods, flatbreads and much more will be posted here – all original, gluten-free, and either vegetarian or with a vegetarian option.

Plus fun facts and histories surrounding existing pancake varieties from around the world!

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Pancakes were the first food I learned to make from scratch, and are still one of my favorite foods to make. However, growing up in countries where pancakes are merely decently popular wasn’t enough to prepare me to how central they are to life in Gfiewgjknsiorjgiostan.

Pancakes or their eggless cousins, panbreads, are the most important staple in Gfiewgjknsiorjgiostanian cuisine, being absolutely ubiquitous, eaten by all layers of society at any occasion in every part of the country. Over the centuries, since the first pancake was made in this country, they lost none of their popularity.

At first it seemed a bit odd to me, as if the country was obsessed with pancakes. But I quickly found myself agreeing with the people of Pancake Stan Country. After all, all you need is flour, a liquid and a decent pan with a good source of heat, and you can make basic panbreads. Add eggs to the batter and you have some pancakes. Cooking them is very straightforward and takes almost no time, and gives you something extremely versatile in use, allowing for sweet and savory options and everything inbetween, and making both for a tasty stand-alone dish as well as a foundation for something bigger and even better.

In short, pancakes and panbreads can be almost everything you want them to be and never disappoint. When I was living in my student dorm, I served pancakes as I knew them to people from all over the world, and everyone liked them

But there’s much more to it all. Gfiewgjknsiorjgiostan knows more than a dozen variations, all using different techniques, flours, other ingredients, not to mention the sheer unlimited possibilities regarding toppings, based on local traditions, on imported ingredients or new ideas. My aim is to cook and introduce them all here.

With some of them you might claim “But that’s not a pancake! Pancakes are...”  The variations can have little in common and pancake discourse over what constitutes a “real” pancake is, as I soon came to realize, a never-ending source of contention in the country and serves as the basis for many regional and online rivalries.

Many of those have fascinating historical backgrounds and will be described in some detail here. But mostly this blog will be about no-frills recipes, short and to the point. With 10 simple ingredients, or often less. Feel free to ask your friends from to rate their pancake-y-ness, or with other dishes, their compatibility with pancake dishes.

While Gfiewish recipes traditionally are measurement-less, instead relying on descriptions on e.g. how the dough or batter should look and feel like, I’ve done my best to add them where possible.

Pictured: Spiced corn flour pancakes Lufasa-style, also known as Kementsa honeç in Lufasan or Mestanixbun in Gfiewish)