Thanks to Michael and Orly LaScola, Chef Todd Edwards and Anna Worgess, who purchased Black-Eyed Susan’s from its previous owner, Susan Handy, the beloved restaurant is back and this year serving its well-regarded breakfasts 6 days a week. (They are closed on Wednesdays.) Breakfast is served to walk-ins from 7am to 1pm.
Being that it is still early in June, we were able to walk in for breakfast without the longer summer wait and sit at a table. The menu is similar to the old restaurant, offering eggs, scrambles, pancakes, hash browns, French toast, omelets and breakfast sandwiches. But even if you have to wait for a while on the benches outside, it’s worth it. It is just about the only breakfast place downtown and it is simply excellent.
We ordered eggs over easy with sausage and their excellent oat bread toast.
But more to the point, we got our tea in an actual teapot: one of the few restaurants in the Northeast that serves it that way.
And did we mention the service? The staff is warm and welcoming, and you can watch it your order being prepared in the open kitchen behind the counter. Our bill for tea, eggs, sausage and toast was $30.49 including $1.99 tax. And it is likely to be one of the best breakfasts we’ll have here!
I first tasted buttermilk at my grandmother’s house in Lincoln, Nebraska. My mother and I had taken the train from Columbus out to Lincoln to visit her family there. I was probably 10 or 12 years old. I came in from playing with my cousin Steve, climbing trees and the like, to find that they were going to make pancakes with buttermilk. I tasted the buttermilk and didn’t like it much. “But,” they said, “wait till you taste the pancakes. They will be like you poured a lot of butter into them!”
And, yes, the pancakes were very good indeed.
Some years later, when I started collecting recipes, I got that buttermilk pancake recipe from my mother’s sister, Elsie, and have saved it ever since. Since it was originally my grandmother’s it is probably over a hundred years old, and was probably made from real buttermilk. Here it is:
2 cups flour
2 eggs
2 tsp baking powder
1 Tb sugar
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
As a memory guide, Elsie pointed out that you can summarize the recipe as 2-2-2-1-1-1/2.
Mix dry ingredients and add buttermilk until you get a “thickish batter.” Cook in a large cast-iron pan or a griddle. Turn the pancakes when they start to show bubbles.
Buttermilk was originally formed by allowing the milk to stand to separate the cream allowing it to ferment a bit. Then, after churning, they let the buttermilk ferment and thicken. But once centrifugal cream separators were developed, you didn’t have to let the cream set and begin to ferment before churning the butter. So, another way to make buttermilk was developed, where they took part skim milk and added the same bacteria that were found in fermenting the original buttermilk. These were usually Lactococcus lactis and Leuconostoc citrovorum. This was called “cultured buttermilk” and is commonly found in the US, where there is little original buttermilk available.
I have been making excellent pancakes using Friendship Buttermilk for over 20 years. But recently, our local market dropping the Friendship buttermilk, offering only Kate’s Buttermilk. You can still buy it at ShopRite and at some Stop and Shops.
So, it seemed like a good idea to compare the two. We made up two identical batches of dry ingredients and eggs, and added buttermilk to each until we reached a “thickish batter” stage. We initially cooked 4 pancakes on each time on our Presto griddle. But recognizing that the griddle’s heating was uneven and measurement of each pancake aliquot was difficult we then simply put one carefully measured ¼ cup of batter on the griddle from each recipe, and placed them close together so they would have the same cooking temperature.
The result:
The pancake on the right, made with Friendship cultured buttermilk, clearly rose higher than the one made with Kate’s buttermilk. We would assume then that the Friendship buttermilk is slightly more acidic and reacts with the leavening more that the Kate’s recipe did.
How did they taste? We tasted a slice of each pancake without any added butter or syrup. The Friendship pancake had a rich buttery-milky flavor, but the Kate’s pancake was quite bland, with no distinct flavor at all.
So, how do the two buttermilks themselves taste? Not surprisingly, the Friendship buttermilk tasted more like buttermilk. The Kate’s just tasted sour. No real butter-milky flavor at all. So, we are sticking with the Friendship for our pancakes. An experiment with biscuits showed similar differences in rising as well.
Sorry to say, despite all the positive press Kate’s has gotten, we found it quite disappointing.
Here’s a simple and delicious breakfast coffee cake you can delight Mom or anyone else with. It’s great for Valentines Day, Easter, Mother’s Day or any other special occasion.
It’s a yeast dough that rises twice: once the night before and once during the night. You can also make the rings in the morning in about 2 hours start to finish.
You make it using canned cherries (not cherry pie filling). You can find canned cherries at supermarkets in the aisle with the canned fruits, not with the baking supplies where that horrible canned pie filling is found.
The dough
½ cup milk
1/3 cup shortening
¼ cup sugar
½ cup lukewarm water
1 package yeast (not instant)
½ tsp sugar
1 egg
3-4 cups flour
The filling
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
1 can red pitted cherries, drained
The icing
½ lb confectioner’s sugar
4 Tb butter
Milk about 3-4 Tb
Place the milk, sugar and shortening in a glass pitcher or bowl and microwave for one minute. The shortening does not need to melt completely.
Place the yeast, water and ½ tsp sugar in another pitcher and stir. Let it sit a few minutes until it’s foamy.
Put the warm milk mixture into the bowl of a food processer and add 1 cup of the flour.
Pulse briefly to mix.
Add the egg and mix.
Add the yeast and mix.
Add 2 more cups of flour, and enough more to make a smooth dough.
Let the dough rise for 60-90 minutes
Melt the butter and combine with the brown sugar and flour.
When the dough has risen, remove it from the food processor and divide it in half.
Roll out each half on a floured board to a 6″ by 18″ rectangle.
Sprinkle half the cherries, half the brown sugar mixture and half the nuts on each rectangle.
Roll the dough into a long tube and place the tube on a greased cookie sheet. Connect the ends and pinch them together to make a ring. Since this makes a round dough ring, you can use a pizza pan for the cookie sheet.
Repeat for the second half of the dough.
Make a series of cuts about 3/4 inch apart going from the outside about 3/4 of the way into the tube.
Take each slice and rotate it about 90 degrees, lifting and twisting it with your knife, so the cherry mixture is horizontal.
Cover the pan containing each ring with aluminum foil (sprayed with a little cooking spray) and cover both wrapped rings with a damp towel.
Allow them to rise in a cool place such as a basement or garage overnight. If you allow them to rise in the refrigerator, make sure they are tightly wrapped. In that case you may have to let them rise a bit more outside the refrigerator in the morning.
Before you go to bed, wash out the food processor so you can use it to make the icing in the morning.
In the morning, preheat the oven to 375 F.
Uncover the rings and bake them for about 15 minutes, until brown.
Ice with butter cream icing and serve warm.
Buttercream icing
Place the confectioners sugar and the butter in a clean food processor bowl and pulse until uniform. Add the milk, a little at a time until the icing is a smooth, spreadable mixture.
Making buttermilk pancakes is so easy and so quick that I never saw any reason to use pancake mixes. The recipe came down from my grandmother, written down by my Aunt Elsie, who pointed out that you can remember it as 2-2-2-1-1-1/2.
Here are all the ingredients:
2 cups flour
2 eggs
2 tsp baking powder
1 Tb sugar
¾ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
Buttermilk (usually 2-3 cups)
1 Tb butter for the griddle
Note that I reduced the baking soda to ¾ teaspoon, to bring out the buttermilk flavor better. If you don’t think this is an easy recipe, watch this video, where I make the batter and make pancakes in less than 8 minutes. You can too.
You mix the above ingredients to make a “thickish batter,” according to my aunt, and while the amount of buttermilk is up to you, I find that you get taller pancakes from a thicker batter. If you like thinner pancakes that cook a little faster, just add a little more buttermilk. Melt the butter on the griddle at 375 F, and cook the pancakes on the first side until you see a few bubbles. Turn them once and cook another minute or so.
This recipe came from my grandmother, the former Edna Perry, who married John Marshall Neely, M.D. in 1901, when she was 19. She probably brought the recipe with her, making it well over 100 years old. While it isn’t wildly unique, it works perfectly every time.
