PANCAKE SUPPER

Image Gallery AL CLAYTON FOOD STYLING BY MARY ANN CLAYTON

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No one has ever gotten ego-involved with a flapjack.

"WHOEVER WANTS TO KNOW THE heart and mind of America had better learn baseball," wrote Jacques Barzun in 1954. Whoever wants to understand America's stomach might ponder the National League play-offs of 1989.

The October games pitted the San Francisco Giants against the Chicago Cubs and, inevitably, the San Francisco press (in the persons of columnists Lowell Cohn and Herb Caen) against Mike Royko, syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune. On the field, it remained a gentleman's game. In the newspapers, it turned nasty. It turned into a food fight.

Pained by the fact that the Cubbies are universally loved and the Giants are not, San Franciscan Lowell Cohn did the only sensible thing: He turned superior. "The big difference between San Francisco and Chicago," he wrote loftily, "is we're sophisticated and you're not. Sure, you're a city of big shoulders. But we're a city with a head attached that has a working brain."

Oh yeah? snorted Chicago's Mike Royko. "Stanford University, just outside your brainy town, has had 13 Nobel prize winners. The University of California at Berkeley has had 15. Very nice.

But the University of Chicago has had 57 Nobels. Put that in your skull and rattle it around, kid."

West Coast writer Herb Caen leapt into the fray. "Chicago," he chortled, is a "city of wide vistas and broad butts. It has size . . . but little of San Francisco's elegance and style."

Anatomical references, Royko retorted,were beneath reply. As for style, Chicago's architecture "makes Frisco look like a whistle-stop," and "our literary tradition . . . makes the Queen City look like a remedial English class."

Having disposed of such minor matters as o intelligence, breeding, and physiognomy, everybody went for the gut.

Chicago, Caen scoffed, "is resolutely o plain, with plain folks eating plain food on z the plains of America." Yes, Cohn chimed Q in, out here "we order dishes like fettucine Q Alfredo or veal piccata."Well, we don't, snarled Royko. Because o fettucine Alfredo is "an outdated culinary o cliche" that's still being served in two places: o San Francisco and "one restaurant in Rome r that caters to ugly American tourists." When Chicagoans want pasta, they lean toward "lobster-filled black pasta triangles." And o veal piccata? "I seldom order that, either, although I had some last week in North Carolina." [Editor's note: Now hold on there, Mike!]

Grown men do not do battle with or about pancakes. And nobody uses them as status symbols.

What do Chicagoans eat? Oh, "fresh foie gras with fresh truffle, radicchio, haricots verts, and walnut dressing; rabbit ballottine, stuffed with sweetbreads; or a maigret of mallard duck, with cranberry glaze and blackcurrant-vinegar sauce." Not every day, of course. "Sometimes a simple cassoulet hits the spot."

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