Pancakes for the People
Pancakes for the People
A pancake breakfast is best eaten outside on an early summer morning, when the light reflects pink and gold along big skies. I have been eating these breakfasts my entire life. On my last day of high school, the principal stood behind a barrel grill overlaid with skillets, flipping pancakes and bumping breakfast sausages backwards and forwards against each other. It was the end of the school year and this was how we celebrated, early in the morning, scattered in the hallways with Styrofoam plates on our knees. Most of the boys in my school were already working the land part-time by the end of finals season, driving into town after waking up at 5 a.m. Pancakes are a cowboy staple, a griddle breakfast rooted in the West’s ranching culture, when workers would eat from the back of a chuckwagon on the trail.
The city three hours north of the small town where I grew up is home to “The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth:” the Calgary Stampede. Held in late-July, the Stampede is a midway and a rodeo, a series of parties and gambling and city boys in country clothes. The high wages of the oil industry having sucked ranching and touring rodeos dry of talent, city rodeos are what we have in terms of country life, even here.
For me, the Stampede essentially means ten full days of free pancake breakfasts. Accompanied by a country music soundtrack, families pile together at picnic tables wearing cheap straw hats and fake belt buckles, syrup poured over everything. The Caravan Committee (a group of Stampede volunteers out to welcome you to death) officially adopted the ranchers’ pancake breakfast in the 1970s, but it was in the early 20s that a sole rancher first served pancakes from his camp stove during the event. My earliest memory of a Stampede breakfast is set in the parking lot of the city’s largest mall. I had sliced into a pancake and the batter tumbled out raw. My mom gave me hers. Last year, I ate pancakes on the concrete floor of an empty community hockey rink, on a picnic table outside a church, in the alley behind a local bar, and in the grocery store parking lot down the street.
Everyone from your cousin to politicians host Stampede breakfasts – our mayor, Naheed Nenshi, flips pancakes in his family’s backyard, and he attends breakfasts even when Stampede falls during Ramadan. He just can’t eat the food. The pancake breakfast has become good branding – corporate Stampede uses flicked pancake batter in their commercials and stock images, though that feels disingenuous because you can eat a pancake breakfast every day, avoid the Stampede grounds and not once pay anyone at the Stampede a damn thing. Even during the rest of the year, Calgarians caravan this meal across the country as part of their personal identity. During the Grey Cup championship game (the final of the Canadian Football League—yes, seriously), westerners cook a pancake breakfast outside in the snow even in the (damned) east.
Canada is a huge, fragmented country. Our regions are isolated and often steeped in stereotype, and our politicians are hard-pressed to find a unifying persona to win us all. The Stampede has always acted as an easy venue for eastern politicians angling for our votes. It is a stage for pre-election posturing and its charms, including the pancake breakfast, have become political. For many years, party leaders would head to Calgary from Ottawa to wear a cowboy hat and yell ‘yeehaw!’ and hope against hope that they’d fit the part. It’s never really worked. But if you can ignore the politicians that swarm these events, you might feel the closest you can get to a natural state of “west.”