A visit to pancake heaven -- also known as Holland

Author: By Edward D. Webster, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, February 7, 1999

Page: M16

Section: Travel

I picked up the menu and read. We were both enthralled and confused. Ham-and-cheese pancakes? Mushroom pancakes? Cherry or apple or banana pancakes with or without liqueur and whipped cream (``schlagroom,'' in the local vernacular)? Interesting, but who would eat a pancake with mushrooms?

How big were these things? Were some of them supposed to be the main course and others dessert? The waitress gave us some guidance. ``You get one pancake on a plate. They can be the meal. They can be dessert. Some people eat them all together,'' she said, smiling.

``Maybe we should each get two?''

``Oh, no. You should not.''

The people at another table laughed and told us, ``They'll be big enough to fill you.'' As we ate our way through Holland, we met more and more friendly, outgoing people, and almost everyone spoke English.

We ordered a banana pancake with liqueur and whipped cream and a bacon and mushroom pancake. They knocked our socks off. Each of us received one huge pancake, which covered an oversized plate. Not as thin as crepes or as thick as the pancakes back home, they were pieces of art, but we didn't pause to admire them. We attacked with knife and fork and found them delicious and filling.

Maybe you've tried every offering at your local pancake restaurant. But now we throw down the gauntlet: Visit Holland and see if you can't find at least 20 kinds of pancakes you've never tried before.

Our pancake exploration took place during the second month of our yearlong adventure in Europe. We were renting apartments for a few weeks at a time and had just finished a month in Paris. When we arrived in Zwolle, Holland (about 75 miles northeast of Amsterdam) in May, we picked up a pamphlet listing ``pannenkoeken'' restaurants at the local tourist office, took it back to the thatch-roofed cottage we were renting, and set it on the table. Our cat, Felicia, who was sharing our adventure (but not the restaurants), stepped on the brochure but otherwise showed no interest. Funny, she usually liked pancakes. Marguerite and I asked our landlady for a recommendation. She told us about the Pannenkoekhuis 't Mussennest a couple miles from the cottage.

A few days after that first success, we tried the Pannekoekschip, a trim, excursion-style boat that floated on a canal in Zwolle. The menu boasted even more varieties of pancakes than the Mussennest. We rejected the pizza pancakes and the Japanese pancakes and went for one mushroom, cheese, and onion and one cherry, kirsch, and whipped cream. We savored the feel of the boat, its coziness, the polished pine picnic tables. I gazed out the window at a 15th-century bell-gabled shop on the canal front. On the other side, the old walls of the fortified city loomed. The scene darkened as an ominous cloud drifted overhead. Rain and hail erupted, clattered on the roof, and splashed in the canal below the window, adding to the adventure. The pancakes arrived to a chorus of thunder.

That Sunday, on an early walk, I spotted the sails turning on the town windmill in Hattem, so I headed toward it. A tall, white-haired man in denim overalls greeted me at the base of the mill and led me inside. I found myself in an octagonal room with posters explaining the workings of the mill, tables displaying grains and different types of flour, and a stout wooden ladder leading to the next level. The room seemed alive with creaking and grinding sounds coming from overhead. We climbed one ladder, then another, up past the workings of the mill. My companion took me out on the deck and talked about the similarities of windmills to sailboats as the big sails swished by, with the canvas stretched only part way on the frames like a sailboat reefed for heavy winds. The man said he was a retired oil company engineer who volunteered to help maintain the mill and run it every Sunday. This glorious, windy day happened to be ``windmill Sunday'' in Holland. He led me into the bowels of the machinery and showed me how the wooden shafts and gears adjusted automatically to shifting wind speeds. Then he made his most important statement. ``The flour from this mill is the best for making pancakes. You don't even need eggs.''

I hurried home and retrieved Marguerite, returned with her to meet my friend. By now, two local women, dressed in traditional flowered skirts, were frying small pancakes on a gas fire at the base of the mill. As each cake came from the pan, a woman sprinkled it with powdered sugar, wrapped it in paper, and sold it to one of the assembled people. We shared one as the women discussed their recipe -- just mix the flour and milk and fry it. Sounded like something we could handle. We had another pancake. I asked, ``Want to try it?'' Marguerite grinned, and I purchased a kilo of flour. We were in business.

It took a few tries, but, over the next couple of weeks, I acquired the knack of flipping giant cakes that filled our fry pan, as we created our own mushroom, cheese, and onion pancakes, banana pancakes, ham-and-cheese pancakes. As promised, the flour from that local windmill was the best (confirmed by later comparison to store-bought pancake mix). The only bad thing about making our own pancakes was that it limited our appetite for eating pancakes away from home.

After leaving Hattem, we settled for three weeks in a bungalow in Hekendorp, Holland, a tiny town eight miles from Gouda (40 miles south of Amsterdam). We rented a tandem bicycle at the train station in Gouda and explored the countryside, very flat and wonderful for bicycling. And we discovered -- guess what? -- more pancake houses and new types of pannenkoeken.

In Shoonhoven, we visited the square where an accused witch was strangled in the 16th century. We stopped by the museum, learned about the town's centuries-old silver trade, checked out the shops full of unique silver ornaments, utensils, and jewelry, famous throughout the country. Then, after building an appetite, we wandered down to the old weigh house, which has been converted into a pancake restaurant. We sat outside, watched the bicycles pass, devoured yet more golden cakes, but found -- no, please say it isn't so! -- nothing new on the menu.

Surely we had reached the end of our pancake discovery tour. Yet each time we pedaled into Gouda, we passed a cute dark-red building, long and funky, sitting by a disused canal, looking like an elongated gypsy trailer converted into a pancake restaurant. It beckoned to me. And beckoned, and. . . .

One day we pedaled over, and there we discovered poffertjes, a very traditional Dutch pancake about the size of a silver dollar. We met Frank, who runs the place. Frank was extremely friendly and spoke English with an Aussie accent. He was proud of his place and the turn-of-the-century stove where he turns out his creations. It's cast iron, the size of a table, with rows of recessed cups on the top. Frank filled a dozen cups from a pitcher of batter with practiced movements as he wiped his brow and grinned.

While Frank flipped the poffertjes with a fork, I wandered around the wood-walled room with long-benched booths framed in white curtains, cut glass designs, and, of course, the great old stove. Frank pointed out an article on the wall in English and a few others in Dutch. I picked up a menu and read the back. The little red building was built as a sweet poffertje stand in 1840, and the business actually goes back 250 years. At one time the building was portable, and it looked similar to the little house where we were living in Hekendorp . . . hmmm.

I joined Marguerite outside on the comfortably cool porch. Frank stopped by to hand me a book containing more than 130 ``recognized'' pancake houses in Holland. I scanned the book and found that it contained Frank's place but omitted all the pancake houses where we'd already eaten. ``Could there be thousands of these places?'' I wondered.

Frank brought our two small orders of poffertjes -- about a dozen with grand marnier and a dozen with banana and schlagroom. The pancakes we'd ordered, the ones with apple and raisins -- the special of the day at about $5 -- arrived a few minutes later. Sort of like having the whipped cream dessert before the other dessert. The whole thing with coffee came to about $15 and was wonderfully tasty -- the poffertjes like little popovers doused in sweet ambrosia. If only we hadn't waited so long to try the place. If only there could be time to go back for one more cake. We still had one more day in Holland.

I didn't have to ask; Marguerite knew what I was thinking. ``No,'' she said. ``That was the last pancake.''

A booklet, ``Holiday Cottages,'' is available from the Dutch national tourist agency. From the United States, call 212-370-7360 or 310-348-9015. We found staying at these cottages an authentic Dutch experience.