Banana Pancakes

Who said dessert is just something to end a meal with? Not so. That’s a very primitive view. Dessert is a treat, a pleasure, or, as a friend of mine puts it, a source of happiness vitamins. Desserts always leave a pleasant taste that lingers for a long time. Like banana pancakes, for example.

There was a time when little sugar was produced, and sweets were only for the rich. There was honey, of course. But as you can imagine, there wasn’t enough honey to go around either. Then in the 19th century mass production of sugar from cane took off, and sweets became affordable. Though being easy to get only made people crave them more.

The most common desserts are confectionery: all sorts of pastries, cakes, muffins, waffles and so on. Plus all kinds of ice cream, candy, fruit salads, jelly and, I almost forgot, chocolate-coated marshmallows.

Besides sugar and honey, almost any sweet edible substance can serve as the sweet ingredient, and there are plenty of them. Even people with diabetes have a sweetener they can use, and more than one.

I, for one, prefer honey. It’s a natural mix of glucose, sucrose and fructose with lots of vitamins. We have honeybees to thank for this gift. Honey is a symbol of harvest and abundance, right alongside bread.

Perhaps the very first dessert of mankind, or simply the first sweet treat, was a flatbread of dough with honey. Pancakes, or similar simple dough dishes. We are used to thin crepes, or nalysnyky, as people call them, the kind made for Maslenitsa, the festival that marks the end of winter. In Bulgaria there is a wonderful and much-loved dessert called palachinki. These are really just thin crepes with various sweet fillings. Very tasty!

When I was little, my grandmother rarely made crepes. She usually made kefir pancakes. The difference between the two is that pancakes are much fluffier. They are made from a thicker batter, for example with yeast or baking soda. By and large, the famous deruny are pancakes too, only made from potatoes instead of flour.

Quite often pancake batter isn’t made from plain flour alone but with fruit or vegetable pulp added. Who remembers carrot pancakes? I had my fill of them at summer camp. But that’s all in the past. Recently I felt like homemade pancakes. Not just any pancakes, but something special. The store had lovely ripe bananas, and the decision made itself.

Bananas used to be quite scarce, very scarce in fact. Once at school they brought in an African guest who spent a long time rambling about revolution, colonizers and so on. It was incredibly boring. I had done something wrong that day, and the teacher sternly ordered me to ask the guest a question. Without thinking twice, I asked: how do bananas grow??? Everyone went quiet, a storm was brewing. But the guest instantly brightened up, and we spent the rest of the time learning something useful. Afterwards I was even thanked for it.

So here is a wonderful recipe: tasty banana pancakes, the way we make them at home.