Dutch Baby

Part I: What I knew
There is one food obsession I have spoken of to nobody. Even writing the name seems odd: Dutch Baby. Dutch Baby. I have not said it aloud since childhood, have written it only once (in a note to myself last week about this article), and have never had one single adult conversation about it.

I realized all this tonight as I sat on the linoleum in front of my stove, switching on the oven light every few minutes to watch the brown and the puff, with the only perfect smell in the world seeping out around the oven door. The Dutch Baby is my secret meal, my fallback dish, but also my favorite – as far as my arm can be said to be my favorite appendage, or my liver my favorite liver. My favorite foods? I never think of it when asked, because it inhabits a different part of my brain and my memory than any other dish. I am, in fact, a little frightened to continue writing about it. Once I give it words, a name, it may become a rational craving, something I will have to someday make for someone else, something ensconced on the page.

My favorites are things like my mother’s bread, salmon sashimi on the right days, asparagus roasted hot hot hot with lemon and pepper, certain peaches, and a tomato I once ate from a friend’s garden with butter on toast. These I can discuss and quantify. These move freely between my conscious and subconscious minds.

The Dutch Baby has never surfaced, and it feels raw now in my left hemisphere.

Once when I was very young my mother made a Dutch Baby. I forget everything about the meal and the time except that there was not enough of the Dutch Baby. It came to the table enormous and steaming, golden and salty and lasting. I remember it like I have remembered nothing else: faces, beaches, conversations. She never made it again. I have never asked her about it.

I don’t remember now if I thought about the Dutch Baby in the intervening years. But when I got my first Joy of Cooking, there was a Dutch Baby recipe in it. I don’t think I stumbled across it; I think one night a memory came vrooming in and I moved, zombielike, to page eight-hundred-something and found the recipe.

I made it as instructed. At the end, there was an extra half cup of butter floating in the skillet, and it was far too sweet. It was all wrong, but it was still more right than any food I’d ever made. My secret food was born.

I have since discovered that the Dutch Baby is impossible to mess up. Perhaps this is because I make it from some other part of me, but I have never yet eaten a bad one. And I am not a good cook, at least as I define that term, for all my love of food. I can follow recipes like a biochemist, with excellent results, even altering them slightly, but I cannot season things correctly from scratch. I cannot estimate how much salt, dried basil, or even how much fresh parsley to add to a sauce. I have made unpalatable bland vegetable mushes and pancakes salty as sardines. But the Dutch Baby is always perfect, and I measure nothing, though I always open the cookbook for reassurance.

After my first experiment with the Joy of Cooking’s recipe, I got out a pencil and made my own notes in the margins, thinking of my two grandmothers’ handwriting on countless recipe cards and my mother’s brisk bold-fonted cooking files backed up on floppy disks in the closet.

I added salt. I decreased the sugar to a tablespoon, then a teaspoon. It may not be necessary at all, but I always add a pinch. Then I halved the butter, writing “Far less – ¼ stick?” And I probably use even less than that. I don’t know.

There are some people that cook this way all the time. Fully half of MFK Fisher’s original recipes encode impossible vagueness, a knowingness I do not know and am afraid to try. But I find the same fuzzy difficulty in codifying the Dutch Baby. You just put eggs and milk and flour and salt, though not in that order, in the pale blue plastic bowl and mix them with a fork for ten or two hundred seconds. You melt some butter, maybe enough for six pieces of toast, in the largest cast iron skillet. Then you remember to turn the oven on. The hum of your day and the trucks outside the window should begin to vanish, your thinking should slow, and your actions should become both deliberate and automatic. Even though you are always hungry, you should not be hungry now. You pour the cream-colored goo into the skillet with the brown snappy butter and wait one minute. You count it out loud. If you have forgotten about the oven until the absolute last minute, you count longer, wiggling the pan at eighty to see if it is firm. You test, pushing it, seeing whether it can possibly go wrong if you wait past one hundred. And then you turn off the burner, put the skillet in the oven, and wait.

The waiting is the best part. You set the timer for ten minutes, lift the cat off your lap when it rings, and peek through the oven window at what is now four inches high and turning pale brown around the edges. You wait two more minutes, or maybe five. Perhaps you are drunk. In this case, you bring the ashtray into the kitchen and sit on the floor with the oven light on, watching. You smoke, even though your old roommate Mary thought smoking in the kitchen was disgusting, and it does make you feel sort of white trash, or maybe a little Depression era.

As soon as the Dutch Baby is crisping up a little and turning darker brown in splotchy patterns, you turn off the oven and pull it out. It starts deflating as soon as you open the oven door, and by the time you can spear it with a fork and slide it onto your plate it is only an inch high, looking more like fry bread with a bad complexion than the golden soufflé it seemed through the oven window.

And then you eat it. This usually takes two or three minutes, even though you try to slow down. The recipe says ‘serves four’: this is wrong. It serves one.

Part II: The known
I made another Dutch Baby today, after writing this, and I was right: something was different. I felt cocky, didn’t open the cookbook, and even though I checked later and my proportions had been correct, the texture was different. I poured it into the pan and it didn’t flow all the way to the edges. It produced a strange smell once I put it in the oven, and I worried that the bottom was burning, that I’d gone below the acceptable butter level. I was worried, thinking too much, waiting anxiously with a potholder, pacing the kitchen.

But after ten minutes, miraculously, the right smell switched on. It puffed up just like always, and when I pulled it from the oven it was unburned, eggy, perfect. I ate it without thinking.

Part III: How to know
Turn the oven on to 450 degrees. Put a medium-large cast iron skillet on the stove over medium heat. Slice off a piece of butter about an inch long (more, if you’re not using the shorter, chubby, organic sticks) and let it melt in the skillet.

In a bowl, mix two eggs, ½ cup flour, ½ cup milk (whatever kind you like), and maybe ¾ teaspoon salt – this varies with whether you use unsalted butter or not. I would err on the side of over-saltiness. Add maybe ½ teaspoon of sugar, unless you don’t feel like it. Mix it for a while. Lumps are okay.

Swirl the butter around the skillet to coat the sides, pour the goo into the skillet and don’t touch it. Don’t stir, don’t spread; just let it sit there for about a minute. Then put the whole thing in the oven and wait, say, 12 to 17 minutes. Let it get goldy-brown and tall around the edges. Then take it out. Remember pot holders.

Part IV: Knowing
The Dutch Baby is, of course, not particularly good for you. But because it is a ritual, because it exists on a different plane than your meals and menus, it is okay. You do not eat it for breakfast every day. You do not eat it in front of other people, or even where other people might smell it and force you to speak its name. It is not sustenance in the strict physical sense, and hence cannot be labeled ‘unhealthy’.

Part V: What I know
When I began this essay, I knew I wouldn’t be able to maintain the ahistoricity of my Dutch Baby. I knew nothing of its past, its name, its customs, and I would be forced, for the sake of credibility, to find out. I know all this now. But I am convinced that the other Dutch Babies, those whose names are printed on menus and in foreign recipe files, have only adopted my Dutch Baby and given it their name, kindly family that they are. Mine is an orphan, an abandoned child of the infidels, and though it is treated well it inspires distrust in its siblings.

Dutch babies, according to this website, were so named by a restaurant that served individual portions of the popular German pancake (The Dutch, as we all know, are like miniature, serving-size Germans).

It is often eaten for breakfast. It is often adorned with fruit from jars, powdered sugar, syrups, spices, or whipped cream. It is often, in other words, tarted up for the masses like a Virgin Mary in bustier and lipstick. Some recipes add sugar to the batter, while others do not, but most agree that this is a sweet food to be eaten with sweet toppings and stuffings. Only one recipe emphasizes the saltier, more elemental Dutch Baby, but this one overcompensates in that direction with cheese and other blasphemies, not to mention the precious names.

I am sure all these Dutch Babies taste very good. Many of them probably taste like jelly doughnuts, others like expensive danishes, some like complicated, subtle soufflés. But these are not Dutch babies one makes because there is nothing left in the house but milk, eggs and flour. These are not consumed to combat the despair of a bad hangover. These are not made while simultaneously reading the last chapter of a wonderful book one refuses to put down. They are not made to celebrate that you are alone, at last.

Other Dutch Babies also like to feel they are complicated, impressive dishes. Despite claims that the recipe is “so simple”, most cooks add details like “Put eggs in a blender and whirl on high speed for 1 minute” and “Add flour a little bit at a time”, none of which are necessary or true. I have made a Dutch Baby using water instead of milk, and it was good. I have made one using butter that sat too near an onion for too long, and it was good, too. I have used one egg instead of two. I have used pastry flour, bread flour, and all-purpose flour. I have made too much batter and too little. The Dutch Baby is unperturbed. It does its work.

Part VI: The unknown
The mystery, as you may have worked out, is where the Dutch Baby I was served at age six came from. It is not a traditional family meal. It was not made according to any recipe I have seen yet except my own. It seems possible that I remembered it wrong (and thus right): I confused my first fry bread or homemade tortilla with this oddly-named brunch item, or declined to paste my portion with strawberry jam and powdered sugar, or read about it and dreamed of being served a puffy, salty plate of something. Or perhaps my mother forgot to add the sugar and never made the dish again out of frustration.

Or maybe my mother sits alone in her kitchen while everyone is away and makes her Dutch Baby. The recipe and the desire are genetic, or so secret they cannot be discussed, the traditions transmitted through one ritual meal at a young age. That one ineradicable memory is handed along, and we are fed.