Found an aebleskiver pan in my new house, and started
ruminating. I've seen aebleskiver
pans in so many people's houses, but no one has ever invited me over for
aebleskivers. There's not much you
can do with an aebleskiver pan besides make aebleskivers, so I imagine that
people buy them with aebleskiver-shaped hole in their hearts or, more likely,
because they look super cute. No
one ever ends up making aebleskivers, though, because it's a pain in the
ass. OR, they try and it doesn't
work out and they don't tell anyone, hanging the aebleskiver pan on the wall to
show how much they appreciate Scandinavian design, or hiding it away in the
back of the cupboard with their Slap-Chop and hard-boiled egg slicer, never to
breathe the word aebleskiver again.
This was almost certainly a conspiracy, perpetuated by the
Danes - in cahoots with the angular masterminds at White Liberal Wal-Mart
(IKEA) - against God-fearing American flat pancake makers. And by flat pancakes I mean PANCAKES,
goddamnit! If we can't make an
aebleskiver, maybe we were never that great at short-order-cookery in the first
place. Instead of patronizing good
old-fashioned patriotic greasy spoons, we should just wear our jorts to the
IKEA food court and eat plate after plate of Swedish meatballs smeared with
cloudberry preserves, our tears souring the gravy as it pools around our chins.
NEVER, I thought. Never…
again. I decided to fight back.
I whisked the dry ingredients. I whisked the wet ingredients. I whisked the egg whites until they had two-inch peaks sharp
enough to pierce a trashy mouse’s bellybutton. I heated up the pan, plopped down some batter, and began to
take back my country. Plus I
filled them with lemon curd, which is delicious. It was slow, it was laborious, it was difficult. My back screamed with pain. My wrist flapped wildly, having endured
a heretofore-unprecendented amount of limpswishing. I sweated, I bled, I pooped my underoos. Then I gritted my teeth and made
poop-filled aebleskivers. The
world’s first skivvy-skivers.
Another in a long line of great American innovations. I sugar-powdered the back of my
trousers and my aebleskivers and sat down to eat. In my home.
Wearing pants. In America. And I am proud to say, they were
literally, and metaphorically, the shit.
