Potato Pancakes with Ricotta and Spinach | Italian Recipe

Everyone remembers the pancakes their mum or grandma made as a kid. Thin crepes or thick little fritters, it doesn't matter. Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake. A taste of childhood, hot and golden, topped with sour cream or honey. And there are countless kinds of them. One is potato pancakes with ricotta.

I suspect the very first dish people ever made from ground grain was a flatbread pancake, not bread. What could be simpler than mixing flour with water and pouring it onto a hot stone? Pancakes are made from a thin batter, usually cooked thin, and then all sorts of fillings are rolled up in them. That's how we do it here: thin crepes (nalysnyky) are wrapped around anything you like or spread with jam. That's how they do it in the Balkans: palačinke made from a thin batter. A wonderful dessert, though nobody stops you from wrapping meat or fish in a palačinka.

In France they make thin crêpes, in England pancakes, and in America, which most of us know better from the cartoons about Chilly Willy the little penguin, the favourite is thick pancakes drizzled with maple syrup, American pancakes. Then there are banana fritters: fried rounds of batter, smaller in size and made with baking soda, which makes them fluffy. I love them with condensed milk.

Potato pancakes are a category of their own. Whatever you call them, deruny, draniki, latkes, rösti… they're always welcome and always delicious. I remember from childhood how, once all the potatoes were dug up in the garden, the family would start frying deruny, which we snatched piping hot straight from the pan, dipped in sour cream and ate on the spot.

And of course there are cheese pancakes, syrniki. They're made from a soft dough of farmer's cheese, or really just farmer's cheese with a little flour. Pancakes with meat are crepes with a meat filling, very tasty and filling.
Italian cuisine has a lovely recipe that is essentially a cross between deruny and syrniki. Frittelle di patate e ricotta: potato pancakes with ricotta and greens.