Pancakes: A Part Of American Culture

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Pancakes in Sociology
Many people across the world eat pancakes. They have been enjoyed by many generations through many centuries and are culturally multifaceted. Pancakes are part of American Culture as the pancake can symbolize many things such as one’s economic class or local culture. Although I have had pancakes often, they have still been something special to me. Breakfast itself was my favorite meal of the day as there was always the massive anticipation of what breakfast would be. To get up in the morning and to smell the sweet aroma is comforting, and the breakfast being pancakes adds a new layer of gratification. Pancakes had brought back memories of when I was young, such as a day when the sun was shining bright, …show more content…

The pancake is a symbol of cultural diversity. It symbolizes economic status depending on how it’s prepared, where it comes from, or what you put on it.
America is a very Eurocentric culture, has many traditions and foods that stem from Europe including the pancake. As mentioned earlier, pancakes have been enjoyed for centuries. The ancient Greeks ate them with honey, and the English under Queen Elizabeth enjoyed them with spices, rosewater, sherry, and apples. Christians before fasting for lent would enjoy pancakes because they needed to use rest of their eggs, milk, and butter (Rupp). Pancakes could be enjoyed in so many ways with so many things, and any culture could adapt the pancake to their own culture despite its predominantly European …show more content…

The linguistic relativity hypothesis argues that we are aware of things when we have words for them (Giddens et al. 60). We have a word for pancakes; in fact, it originates from the Middle-Ages, meaning cake or batter that would be fried in a pan ("Pancake."). However, there is not just one English word for pancakes; there are many, including hot cake, griddlecake, flapjack, Johnnycake, and corncake to name a few, each of these being unique and specific to local culture or region. Johnnycake, for instance, has its roots in the early American colonies. It was a slightly different recipe, one who used corn or Indian meal instead of wheat (Rupp). All these different terms show the localization the pancake can take within a culture. They essentially make the pancake their own. Also, pancakes are so ingrained in American culture that we even have idioms to compare something to pancakes. The term “flat as a pancake” is often attributed to something very flat. There were even humorous studies done to measure and compare the relative flatness between Kansas and a pancake (Rupp). The phrase “selling like hotcakes” means something is popular. These phrases show the pancakes popularity within a

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