Appelpannenkoek

In my grandmother's second notebook, the pannenkoek pages are stained more than written. Flour, milk, eggs, salt. That is the whole grammar. During lean years, this was the dish that stretched the cupboard across a table, and after lean years it stayed because children are wiser than economists. They know when a thing is worth keeping.

The name already tells you almost everything: pannenkoek, pan-cake, not a small breakfast stack but a broad, thin pancake cooked one at a time in a skillet and eaten whenever the household decides it has had enough seriousness for one day. But let me tell you a secret. The apple version is not dessert wearing a disguise. It belongs to the Dutch habit of making supper from plain things and then allowing one small luxury, cinnamon, that old VOC cargo now living quietly in the sugar bowl.

Choose a tart apple that keeps its shape, slice it thin, and let the butter catch its edges before the batter goes in. That little head start matters. The apple softens, the sugars darken, and the pancake cooks around the slices instead of merely carrying them. Hou het altijd simpel, always keep it simple: a hot pan, a patient flip, cinnamon sugar at the end, and the first one eaten standing by the stove because nobody has ever successfully waited for a full stack.