Spotlight: Pancake Day at the Farmers' Outlet

The best of the toppings. The Spy was sufficiently excited by the whole process that everything else had been consumed by the time he remembered to take a photo.

As far as the Spy is concerned, Valentine’s Day can go hang, but Pancake Day or Shrove Tuesday is a glorious moveable feast celebrated by the Spy with a passion verging on religious mania. This year, the two fell within days of each other, which meant that the Spy felt able to stoically ignore the former and joyfully embrace the latter, with syrupy bells and sticky whistles on. Interrogate the Spy about his favourite toppings and he is likely to become rather over-excited and over-hyphenated, waxing lyrically on the pleasures of old-school choices such as lemon-and-sugar, the exotic delights of bacon-and-maple-syrup, sophisticated continental dollops of fruit preserves, and excesses of good old-fashioned British Golden Syrup. Pausing for breath, he will then continue at increasingly fevered pitch, extolling the virtues of Nutella-and-bananas, honey-and-cinnamon and stewed-apples-and-yoghurt, before passing out on the floor, dribbling feebly and muttering about the differences between crepes and English pancakes, Scottish drop scones and American silver dollars. And don’t even get him started on savoury toppings, lest his head falls off.

The top-purveyors-of-Cantabrigian-pancakes entry will be saved for another time (hint: Cambridge Arts Picture House), since the Spy firmly believes that no Pancake Day is complete without at least one kid (or one grown kid-at-heart) troughing down home-made browned and blistered offerings faster than you can get them out the pan. But where to procure all the toppings, dear reader, I hear you ask? One answer: the Farmers’ Outlet on Lensfield Road. This is an unsung hero whose existence should be trumpeted from the rooftops, a pin that pops the Cambridge bubble inhabited by many living in the city centre and reconnects them to the local delights that lie beyond. The produce changes depending on who has made a glut of jam, who has making venison burgers, smoking fish or baking scones and cakes that week, but there are also regular items such as cheeses, meats, eggs, milk, fruit, veg and flowers.

The Farmers' Outlet celebrates spring, both inside and outside its windows.

So, in honour of the holy feast of Pancake Day, the Spy traipsed along to the Farmers’ Outlet to acquire local eggs, milk and flour (Fosters Mill, Swaffham Prior) for the pancakes themselves. For the savoury offerings, he spied out goats’ cheese (Wobbly Bottom Farm), mushrooms and onions. For the in-between course (savoury? sweet? who knows? who cares!) he purloined smoked dry cured back bacon (Grasmere Farm) to go with the bottle of maple syrup already in his fridge. For the finale, he found fig preserve, spiced apple jam and strawberry compote (Garden of Suffolk) in order to create a veritable painter’s palate of multicoloured splodges on his final pancake.

Eggs, flour and milk for the pancakes, cheese for the savoury fillings, and bread and muesli for next day's breakfast. Sorted.

A surfeit of lampreys may have done for King Henry I, but the Spy has a sneaking suspicion that it will be a flatter, rounder dish that will polish him off. Alas, the Spy has to admit that when his tummy blew the whistle at full-time, there were still a couple of pancakes left, which had to be taken round to the Co-Op for lads on duty, who had been bemoaning the fact that they were working and therefore missing Pancake Day. The moral of this meandering, winding story? Stuff yourselves full of as many pancakes as you can humanly fit in your belly, cover them with toppings gathered from all over the Fens, and try not to polish off the pot of apple jam afterwards, however delicious it might be, as it will almost certainly defeat you and cause you to explode messily all over the kitchen.

Toppings, toppings everywhere, and the Spy's stomach is in no danger of shrinking...

The Spy will sign off with his own basic British pancake recipe. It is ingrained in ancient lore that the first one will always turn out badly, but this should not be cast aside, rather fought over as the ‘lucky extra pancake’:

4 oz plain flour

1 egg (and optional extra egg white to make the batter fluffier, whisked to soft peaks)

1/2 pint milk with little water mixed in

Pinch of salt

Bung everything into a blender and blend until the ingredients are just mixed (dont over-mix or the pancakes will be tough).

If you dont have a blender, sift the dry ingredients into a bowl, make a well in the middle, pour in the egg and milk and whisk to combine. 

If using, fold in the extra egg white.

Leave batter to stand for up to 20 minutes.

Heat and oil a frying pan, pour in some of the mixture and swirl it around to cover the bottom of the pan. Lift the edge and peep underneath to check it is golden brown, then flip it and let the other side cook.

Cover with toppings and devour, greedily and without reserve.

Happy little pancake sizzling in the pan, blissfully unaware of his impending doom...