Down a rabbit hole in search of a trans-Atlantic pancake race

I’ve been momentarily distracted by whether it is going down a wormhole or going down a rabbit hole – I think wormhole is American and rabbit hole is English, but these days there is such a crossover I guess in fact I could have written anything, especially  as I’m going to talk about a newspaper cutting from the 1960’s.

I’ve mentioned that a kind chum gave me a little recipe index book – divided alphabetically so you can write recipes from friends and relatives and elsewhere into a handy and quite small notebook, 4″ x 6″. As with all such books there are odd things torn or cut out of magazines and newspapers, including a report entitled ‘Winning the Toss’ about  a Olney trans-Atlantic pancake race. Obviously they don’t race across the Atlantic tossing pancakes, that would be silly and impossible, but they must have had two pancake running courses of the same distance, one in Olney, Buckinghamshire, UK and the other in Liberal, Kansas.

Olney is a market town and civil parish in the unitary authority area of the City of Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England. At the 2021 Census, it had a population of 6,600.
Liberal is the county seat of Seward County, Kansas, United States. As of 2024, the population of the city was 18,743. It is located in southwestern Kansas, along U.S. Route 54 highway, near the Kansas-Oklahoma state line.

I will share the whole article which, I discovered by sleuthing, was published in 1966:

WINNING THE TOSS
Pancake is February 11th this year and in Olney in Buckinghamshire, and in Liberal, in Kansas,, they are getting ready for their annual race. The Shrove Tuesday trans-Atlantic pancake race has been run since 1950 between the British and American women and America is slightly in the lead.
Last year’s winner was a 16-year-old schoolgirl. This year a cheque worth £10 (about £238 today) in the form of a pancake will be the special prize for the winner and after the race it will be cashed at a local bank.
The right pan makes a lot of difference when you are making  pancakes , as every good cook will tell you, so hare is a selection from the kitchen shop Divertimenti, 63 Marylebone Lane, London, W.1. (unfortunately the picture is not attached) All three pans have one important point in common – they have a big flat base and fairly straight sides. This is important both for the shape of the pancake and the the eventual, tricky moment of flipping it over.
Pancake pans should be kept solely for pancakes and should never be washed. To clean them you should wipe them thoroughly with a piece of kitchen or greaseproof paper.
Our Common Market neighbours in France consider themselves the world’s experts on the pancake which they call a crêpe. So it was from a book of French cookery that I chose the following recipe. One important point: try and rest the pancake batter for at least an hour before cooking.

For this recipe (sufficient for 12 pancakes) you will need:
4 oz sifted flour (plain)
½ tablespoon sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 oz melted butter
1 cup milk
1 egg
2 egg yolks
1 oz butter
sugar and lemon juice
Sift the flour, sugar and salt together.
Mix with the melted butter.
Add the milk slowly, then one egg beaten slightly, and the two yolks.
Beat with a wooden spoon until bubbles appear on the top.
Brown one teaspoon of butter or margarine in a frying pan.
Tilt the pan so that the fat covers the whole pan.
Pour in two tablespoonfuls of the mixture and brown each side in turn.
Serve hot, sprinkled with sugar and lemon juice.

If the illustration had been attached there would have been photos of a variety of frying pans, cast iron and steel,, French and German, a Pyrex mixing bowl and kitchen tools, a balloon whisk with a wooden handle, an aluminium sugar sifter and an individual lemon slice squeezer.

The Divermenti Cookery Shop is still in existence, still in Brompton Road, London, and has a cookery school. It looks a most wonderful place, I would absolutely love it! I don’t know who wrote the article, but the photo we can’t see was by Peter Williams.  Peter who was born in 1937 and died in 2009, was a very significant, talented and important photographer, described in an obituary as “one of the finest photographers working in that golden age of advertising and editorial photography.” 

My featured image is of an Easter cake I made a few years ago.

I didn’t realise I’d written about the Olney pancake race before:

https://loiselsden.com/2017/01/29/defeated-by-a-pancake/