Secret Pilgrim-Syrup

Today’s post comes to you from Hamilton Barber, and I feel old introducing him to you. You see, the Hamilton Barber I remember is the one pictured here, a sweet little boy with two precious younger siblings:

The Barbers were a strong respected family in the church where The Chef and I got married, and you will get exactly that feel from this piece, set in the beautiful mountains of Boone, North Carolina. I miss those mountains and this family, and I love Facebook for making it possible to stay in touch with friends from times past. And even getting to see the children of those friends now grown up.

This is Hamilton now, with his fiance, Morgan:

Enjoy!

For something like eleven years, or at least long enough that the word “Saturday” still conjures air thick with maple and coal engines, Saturdays were for pancakes and Tweetsie.

It began when my brother and I were young enough to need a minimum time to rise in the morning: “Seven-oh-oh on this clock,” like a deadline. It afforded my parents enough time to have the atmosphere in the house ripe with sugar and Bisquick, the kitchen teeming with light filtered through simmered smoke from white batter on the griddle.

We’d spray out of our bunk-bedded room after waiting the final long minutes until seven and then explode into the kitchen, sometimes catching our parents dancing to the rhythm of bubbling paste on a skillet. Love runs thick like maple syrup in our house, and that’s what my mother told me made our food so good.

Andrew and I clamored around the table after our good mornings and my father called over, pointing to him and me in turn, “Let’s see… plain and blueberries?” Obviously. But his question was one of ritual, not one to ascertain information. Part of the sacredness. Like asking for objections at a wedding.

They arrived on our plates from his spatula stacked two high (for to this day, I insist they taste better coupled with a batter brother), mine dotted with blue, marble-sized freckles. Boone blueberries are things of legend; the mountain air makes them potent, and they burst like ink sacs when cut with a fork after being seared on my father’s skillet.

Finally, in my mother’s hands came what separated these pancakes from what the recipe on the back of the Bisquick box couldn’t deliver, and what ruined all pancakes besides these forever: homemade Maple Syrup. My parents promised that the syrup was the product of a longstanding family secret (which I assumed meant that it came over on the Mayflower scrawled on a scrap of parchment in a voyager’s pocket, secreted to guard it from the hands of pious Pilgrims convinced nothing so good could be Godly), and we were convinced that perhaps it was the dancing in the kitchen that added actual, physical love like an ingredient on a recipe card. A dotting of maple flavoring. A dollop of white and brown sugar. A douse of water. A dance of love.

My mother bore it to us in a silver pot and transferred it to a white gravy cup on the table, the brown, sticky stuff disappearing into a wash of steam like water at the bottom of Niagara Falls like I’d seen in a National Geographic at school.

I never used butter, but that wasn’t a rule; I simply wanted nothing to detract from the spritz of blueberry, the puff of pancake, the steam of syrup prepared on the stove.

You didn’t even need a knife; in fact, such cutlery was blasphemy to the Art of Pancake in the Barber house. I didn’t know why until years later, when my father was teaching me how to flip them, which was quite esoteric knowledge in itself.

“First, butter the skillet,” he said, spreading it with a spatula as the diminishing sliver of butter disappeared in one final, skittish dance across the hot surface. “Now watch; this is important.” A wad of paper towel in his hand then brushed the pan, removing the trails of the butter’s final tango. “That makes them fluffy.”

Of course. The recipe for the pancakes was on the box: Milk, eggs, Bisquick… but nothing about the paper towel. The recipe for syrup was traditional: water, brown sugar, maple… but nothing about the dancing.

We’d gobble our pancakes and flit off to our room to don chaps, leather holsters, cap guns, cowboy hats, and sheriff badges with our names on them to pin on our vests, and then we’d ride with dad to a local train-themed amusement park called Tweetsie, which counted on our season passes in their annual budget.

We’d ride the passenger train and brush silt out of our eyes; we’d smell the sharp expended gunpowder from Cowboy vs. Indian battle reenactments; we’d pan for gold in a sanded trough and speculate as to the nature of the gems we’d one day discover (but never did). We jittered from bellies full of sugar; we soared from hearts filled with Barber family secrets.

Exhausted, we’d return home smelling of the iron bars we posed for disposable camera pictures behind and be greeted by the afterglow of the morning’s ritual breakfast. It was clockwork; it was how we marked our weeks. Mom would have cleaned the dishes and enjoyed an afternoon by herself, free from the joyful burden of young children, and then sit with my dad while Andrew and I burst cap gun ammunition with rocks outside.

We’d sometimes see them fall asleep in the post-breakfast air on the couch. The morning’s smell caked our nostrils and sweetened the rest of our meals for a week, but love, itself a physical ingredient, caked the walls of our home. And that lasted longer than even the smell of secret Pilgrim-syrup echoed through generations of parents teaching children how to flip pancakes could.

About the Author

Hamilton is a private tutor, editor, almost-husband, and musician from Chattanooga, TN. He has been published in poetry magazines, has recorded electric guitar on three full-length albums, has traveled the East Coast in a van with smelly bandmates, and writes with fountain pens because he finds them lovely.

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