Some people have a dish that makes them feel like a child again. Not in the bad way, not in the way that means helpless or small, but in the good way: safe, held, temporarily released from the ordinary terror of being an adult with responsibilities and a body that is slowly betraying you in new and creative ways. For me, that dish is Pumpkin Spice Pancakes. I didn't know this for a long time. You rarely know these things until you encounter the dish unexpectedly, in a context where you weren't braced for it, and then it hits you all at once: the memory, the feeling, the particular texture of a moment from years ago. This happened to me at a dinner party in 2007, when I was thirteen, when the host brought out a dish I hadn't seen since I was a child and I had to excuse myself for a moment because my eyes were doing something embarrassing. The host was very gracious about it. She said nothing. She refilled my glass. She is a good person.
My relationship with Pumpkin Spice Pancakes can be described as long, complicated, and ultimately unresolved, which is the same way I would describe several of my actual relationships. The first encounter was pure delight, the way first encounters often are. The second was an attempt to recreate that delight that fell short in ways I didn't fully understand. The third was an attempt to understand the second. I've been somewhere between the third and fourth encounter ever since, knowing enough to know what I don't know, which is the least comfortable kind of knowing. my father used to say that this dish requires patience and that patience is something you either have or you develop, usually through suffering. I have thought about that sentence more than I have thought about many things.
I want to be specific about what makes the best version of Pumpkin Spice Pancakes different from the adequate version, because the gap is real even if I can't entirely explain it. The adequate version is fine. It tastes like what it is. The best version is its own argument for existing: every element doing something necessary, nothing superfluous, the whole greater than the sum in a way that seems impossible until you're in the middle of it and then seems obvious. my father made the best version. I have made the adequate version. I am not sure the distance between them is fully crossable, but I intend to keep trying.
I'm going to level with you: I don't actually have the recipe written down in a format I trust. I have a version. My version. The version I've cobbled together from memory and repetition and a note on my phone that says "more of the second thing, not too much." What I don't have is the real recipe, my father's recipe, or the recipe from a hole-in-the-wall place in the Mission District in San Francisco, or the recipe that exists in the Platonic ideal version of this dish that I've been chasing for years. I feel it's dishonest to give you my approximation while implying it's the truth. So the recipe will appear here once I'm confident it's worth following. That date is not yet determined. I appreciate your patience more than I can say.