Welsh Crempog

The kitchen smells of warm butter and the faintly sour tang of buttermilk hitting a hot pan. It's March, the first of the month, and outside the weather is doing that thing it does in early spring where it can't decide between rain and something almost hopeful. The crempog don't care about the weather. They belong to this time of year.

Thicker than an English pancake, softer than a Scotch one, risen with buttermilk and cooked on a bakestone until the underside is an honest gold. You butter them as they come, stacking one on top of another so the warmth from each keeps the stack together, the butter pooling between layers. There's a word for this in Welsh that I won't butcher with my pronunciation, but the meaning is clear enough: small, round, and good.

I first had these in a farmhouse kitchen in Carmarthenshire, standing at a table that had clearly seen decades of flour and butter. The woman who made them didn't measure anything. She poured the batter from a jug and knew by sight when to turn them. I wrote it down that evening: buttermilk, bakestone, salted butter, March. A recipe is a conversation, not a contract. This one barely needs writing down at all.

They're traditional on St David's Day and again on bonfire night, which tells you something about their nature. They're for cold evenings and occasions that call for warmth without spectacle. We're only making pancakes. But sometimes that's everything.