Saturday started with fluffy, delicious buttermilk pancakes. It ended in fire. More on that later.

The only acceptable recipe comes from The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer. Do not be fooled by any other recipes. They will tell you that there should be more flour and less butter. They are wrong.

Once, in a super secret ceremony several miles from Geneva city center, my brother taught me two key secrets to joyful pancakes. I will share them with you now: 1) more butter, and 2) let the batter rest for a while before cooking the cakes.

Also, as everyone well knows, one should not over-stir the batter. Lumps are good. To be technical, over-stirring produces gluten and your pancakes will be less fluffy. To be less technical, over-stirring is too much work for a Saturday morning. I waited a full 30 minutes for my batter to rise. To be technical, the baking soda makes this happen. To be less technical, this is the right amount of time to drink coffee and develop ambitious plans for the rest of the day. Hence the aforementioned fire.

We could talk about a number of things at this point: pancake size (3 spoonfuls), flipping technique (it’s in the wrist), cooking surfaces (two buttery cast irons for double flipping), etc. But we won’t. Just dig in.