August 22: Sucking-Pigs, Long Wreaths of Sausages, Silver Dollar Pancakes

I'm hungry this morning.  So, when I was looking for a passage from A Christmas Carol to focus on, I returned to a paragraph I've already written about.  It centers around the appearance of the Ghost of Christmas Present, and has this this little section:

...Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam...

It's not a coincidence that the stave dealing with the present is filled with descriptions of Christmas feasts.  I think Dickens wrote this entire section of the book right before breakfast or dinner.  He had to have been hungry, considering the ink he spills on sucking-pigs and such.  You can't get around the fact that, even today, Christmas celebrations often center around food.

I woke up thinking about breakfast.  Not just my normal breakfast.  I usually have two eggs with cheese for my first meal.  No, I was thinking about chocolate chip pancakes for some reason.  When I was a kid, on Sunday mornings after church, my parents sometimes took my siblings and me to a restaurant called the Silver Dollar.  The breakfast special at the Silver Dollar were Silver Dollar chocolate chip pancakes, and they were spectacular.

My memory of those pancakes is probably tinged with a little retrospective falsification (to use a term created by writer Mario Puzo).  What I mean by that is that the pancakes probably weren't as good as I remember them to be.  However, this morning, those pancakes, in my mind, were perfectly golden and laced with melted chips of the finest Swiss chocolate.  The buttery stack was topped by a dollop of whipped cream and a drizzle of Hershey's syrup from a can.  After an hour in church, listening to a boring homily, I was rewarded with this plate of gastronomic paradise.

I never used maple syrup on these pancakes.  That would have been sacrilege.  No, the combination of whipped cream and Hershey's syrup and melted butter was enough.  Each bite dissolved in my mouth the way I imagined the Body of Christ dissolving on my tongue at communion.  I hadn't made my first communion at the time, and I thought those little wafers would taste like all of my favorite foods:  ham and chocolate and bacon and marshmallow and banana and chocolate chip pancakes.

Saint Marty needs a little Silver Dollar communion this morning.

The Body of Christ, with a little whipped cream