winter squash pancakes with crispy sage and brown butter
There comes times in every cookbook author’s life that they have a very specific kind of gift to bestow on unsuspecting others — tasty, deeply loved dishes that were dismissed/ejected/left homeless in the editorial process because they didn’t make the cut. The reasons may be myriad; the ingredient, format or flavor felt redundant with another dish or, as happened here, something else about it gnawed at me until I decided it was best to move on without it.
I believe we call these rejects. I, however, prefer to call them displacements, and I’m not even sad because this means I get to share it with you sooner. These are my most favorite dinner pancake to date and I loved them as endlessly when I made them for the first time two years ago (it’s true, I am this slow at book-ing) as I did when I revisited them last weekend. Here you use any roasted, mashed winter squash — I’ve made this with both kabocha and butternut but you can use whatever you have or can get — and you whisk it into a quick, thick batter with sour cream or buttermilk, flour, eggs and then, instead of the predictable sugar and pumpkin spice, we add salt, pepper and gruyere or parmesan, if you’re feeling it (no surprise here: we always are) and spoon them into a frying pan just like you were making pancakes on a Saturday morning, if you are the sort of person who does such things.
Not that anyone asked the details, but this is where I got stuck. Do we serve them with a yogurt sauce? Eh. Some sort of salsa verde? Probably, but they were so mellow, I wasn’t sure they needed anything so sharp. And so I started Googling “savory squash pancakes” and all the way at the bottom of the second page of results, I discovered that someone, the lovely and dangerous* Mimi Thorisson had gotten to my pancake idea first and I was very sad because I like to believe every thought that comes to my head is a special butterfly/unique snowflake, even when the evidence to the contrary mounts. And then right after I was sad, I realized that the recipe had did something mine had not yet — stuck the landing. Thorisson has you finish the pancakes with a bit of sage crisped in brown butter that you pour over the pancakes and it is everything, the perfect coda. It’s also a little crazy — yes, we’re just going to pour some butter over these pancakes like we’ve never heard of arteries — but I find that very little goes a long way and also that there’s absolutely nothing else on top that will be half as unforgettable.
* I had coffee with Mimi, her husband and two of their gorgeous kids a couple years ago and by the end of the hour was so charmed, the spell they cast is so pervasive, I was 100% ready to buy a farmhouse in France. Actually, I still cannot remember why we have not.
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