" When I was growing up, the taste of pancakes meant the kind that my great-uncle made for me from Bisquick. If condensed cream of mushroom soup was the Great Assimilator, then this "instant" baking mix was the American Dream. With it, we could do anything. Biscuits, waffles, coffee cakes, muffins, dumplings, and the list continues to grow even now in a brightly lit test kitchen full of optimism. My great-uncle used Bisquick for only one purpose, which was to make pancakes, but he liked knowing that the possibilities, the sweet and the savory, were all in that cheery yellow box. Baby Harper wasn't a fat man, but he ate like a fat man. His idea of an afternoon snack was a stack of pancakes, piled three high. After dancing together, Baby Harper and I would go into his kitchen, where he would make the dream happen. He ate his pancakes with butter and Log Cabin syrup, and I ate my one pancake plain, each bite a fluffy amalgam of dried milk and vanillin. A chemical stand-in for vanilla extract, vanillin was the cheap perfume of all the instant, industrialized baked goods of my childhood. I recognized its signature note in all the cookies that DeAnne brought home from the supermarket: Nilla Wafers, Chips Ahoy!, Lorna Doones. I loved them all. They belonged, it seemed to me, to the same family, baked by the same faceless mother or grandmother in the back of our local Piggly Wiggly supermarket.
The first time that I tasted pancakes made from scratch was in 1990, when Leo, a.k.a. the parsnip, made them for me. We had just begun dating, and homemade pancakes was the ace up his sleeve. He shook buttermilk. He melted butter. He grated lemon zest. There was even a spoonful of pure vanilla extract. I couldn't bring myself to call what he made for us "pancakes." There were no similarities between those delicate disks and what my great-uncle and I had shared so often in the middle of the afternoon. "

― Monique Truong , Bitter in the Mouth