Ontario’s blueberry barrens — from Muskoka to Thunder Bay — have been producing wild blueberries for as long as anyone can remember, and the First Nations people of the north have gathered them for millennia. By the time cottagers discovered the province’s lakes in the early 1900s, the blueberry pancake had already become the unofficial breakfast of the Canadian summer. There’s something about a stack of them on a screened porch, with the lake mist burning off and a pot of coffee on, that defines the season.
What makes them great is the pop of tart-sweet juice against the soft, fluffy buttermilk batter — each pancake a little pocket of summer. Wild blueberries are smaller and more intensely flavoured than the giant cultivated ones, so use them if you can find them, and fold them gently into the batter so they stay whole. Drenched in maple syrup, they’re the breakfast that makes everyone linger at the table a little longer.
