Pancake

• 1. Introduction

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  A pancake, also called a hotcake, griddlecake or flapjack, once sent a woman running to church with her frying pan still in hand. Tradition places the scene in Olney, England, in 1445. A housewife was frying pancakes to eat before the Lenten fast when the bells of St Peter and St Paul's Church called her to the Shriving Service. She dashed out in her apron and headscarf, tossing the pancake as she ran so it would not burn. The story is said to explain a race that is still run today. The food behind it looks humble: a flat, often thin and round cake of starchy batter, cooked on a hot griddle or frying pan. Yet archaeological evidence suggests people probably ate pancakes in prehistoric societies. Since then they have reached Greek poetry and dinner tables from Ethiopia to Alaska. How does one simple batter become so many different dishes? What decides whether a pancake rises, rolls, folds, or even serves as a plate? And why do some countries eat it at breakfast while others save it for one day a year?

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• 2. Ancient Frying Pans

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  The Greek word for a frying pan, tagenon, gave its name to some of the earliest pancakes on record. Greek cooks made tagenites, also spelled tagenias, and the very word points back to the pan. The earliest attested references to tagenias appear in the works of two poets of the 5th century BC, Cratinus and Magnes. Those cakes were made with wheat flour, olive oil, honey and curdled milk, and people served them for breakfast.

  A second Greek pancake, the staititis, took its name from stais, the flour of spelt. The writer Athenaeus mentions staititas in his Deipnosophistae, topped with honey, sesame and cheese. Rome offers a contrast. The Romans fried sweets they called alia dulcia, Latin for "other sweets," but these were quite different from the pancakes we know today.

  The English name arrived far later. The Middle English word pancake first appears in the 15th century.

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• 3. Batter Rules

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  Ask an English cook and a Scottish cook for a pancake and you will get two different things. English pancakes are often unleavened and thin. In Scotland and North America, cooks add a leavening agent, typically baking powder, and the result is thick and fluffy. At the thin end sits the crêpe, a pancake of Breton origin. It is cooked in a special pan or crepe maker to produce a lacelike network of fine bubbles. Palatschinke, from southeast Europe, is another thin one. It is fried on both sides and filled with jam, cream cheese, chocolate or ground walnuts.

  Change the liquid or the flour and the name changes too. Buttermilk gives a tart flavor, and the buttermilk pancake is common in Scotland, Ireland and the United States. Buckwheat flour produces a whole family that includes blini, kaletez, ploye and memil-buchimgae. A batter built mostly on potato gives a potato pancake.

  History shows how loose the recipe can be. Gervase Markham's 1615 version in The English Huswife used water instead of milk and added sweet spices. Yorkshire pudding comes from a similar batter but is baked rather than fried. It rises because the beaten-in air expands, and it is eaten with a traditional roast beef dinner. The crumpet uses yeast, sometimes with baking powder, and is fried in butter to make a slightly raised flat cake. In Staffordshire, the savoury oatcake counts as a pancake of its own.

  Factories joined the kitchen as well. Commercially prepared mixes are sold in some countries, and frozen pancakes from companies like Eggo sit alongside frozen waffles.

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• 4. The Edible Plate

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  In Ethiopia and Eritrea, the pancake is also the plate. Injera is a yeast-risen flatbread with a slightly spongy texture, traditionally made from teff flour, and it is a national dish in both countries. Similar breads are eaten across the Horn of Africa, in Djibouti and Somalia as well. Names include budenaa in Oromo and canjeero in Somali.

  A diner tears off small pieces with the right hand and uses them to scoop up stews called wat, or salads. Salads are especially common during periods of Ethiopian Orthodox fasting. The injera beneath the food soaks up the juices and flavours, and it is eaten once the stews are gone. When the "tablecloth" of injera disappears, the meal is over.

  Somalia, Djibouti and Yemen share a related bread, lahoh, which is often eaten with honey, ghee and tea. At lunch it may arrive with curry, soup or stew.

  Elsewhere on the continent the pancake takes gentler forms. Kenyan pancakes are eaten at breakfast in place of bread, with the sugar already mixed into the batter. In South Africa, a "pancake" means a crêpe, called a pannekoek in Afrikaans. Cooks traditionally make pannekoeke on gas stoves, and families eat them on wet and cold days with cinnamon-flavoured sugar and sometimes lemon juice. They are a staple at Dutch Reformed Church fêtes.

  Uganda has kabalagala, pancakes made from very ripe ndizi bananas and cassava flour, served at breakfast or as a snack. The steamed version is called Ebwanga.

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• 5. Asian Griddles

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  On Okinawa, the name hirajacii means "fry flat." It is a simple dish of eggs, flour, salt, black pepper and green onions, fried in a little oil. People cook it at home, and no specialty shop in Okinawa serves it. Mainland Japan has okonomiyaki, made from flour, egg, cabbage and a choice of other ingredients, and dorayaki, a sandwich of Western-style pancakes around anko. Japanese cooks also invented a soufflé-style pancake, cooked inside rings. It is taller and fluffier than the American pancakes that inspired it, and it has spread to Singapore, Toronto, Australia and the United Kingdom.

  Korea has savoury buchimgae and jeon, bindae-tteok made from mung beans, and hotteok, a filled sweet pancake. Chinese pancakes are generally made from dough rather than batter, using water, flour and vegetable oil. They often accompany duck.

  India has many styles, and none of them uses added raising agents. In the north, sweet cheela are made from wheat flour and sugar or jaggery. Savoury ones use gram flour or green gram paste. In the south, dosa, appam, neer dosa and uttapam begin with rice and black lentil batter that is left to ferment. Assam serves pitha on occasions such as Bihu, and Bengal has pati-shapta, stuffed with grated coconut or thickened milk. In Goa, a crêpe-like alebele with a filling of jaggery and coconut is a tea-time treat.

  In Nepal, the Newar people top a savoury rice pancake called chataamari with meat or eggs. It is also known as the Newari Pizza. Bangladesh steams its chitoi pitha from rice flour for festivals. Sri Lankan coconut pancakes get their yellow color from turmeric.

  In the Philippines, the rice pancake salukara is baked over hot coals in a pan lined with banana leaves. Burma has bein mont, baked in rice flour batter with jaggery, coconut and sesame seeds. Indonesia has serabi, made with rice flour and coconut milk and served with a thick coconut sugar syrup called kinca.

  Banana pancakes are a menu item in backpacker-oriented cafes in Southeast Asia. That gave rise to the term Banana Pancake Trail, for the routes travelled through Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

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• 6. European Pans

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  Denmark's æbleskiver contain no apples, even though the name literally means "apple slices." Cooks pour batter into the hemispherical dips of a special cast iron pan. As the cakes cook, they turn them with a knitting needle, skewer or fork to form a sphere. The Dutch poffertjes are also small. They are made in a dimpled copper or cast iron pan and flipped once with a fork. Unlike the large Dutch pannenkoeken, which can be about 12 inches across, their batter contains baking powder, so they have a softer interior. In the Netherlands, pancake restaurants are popular with families. A classic filling pairs bacon with stroop, a thick syrup made from sugar beets.

  Sweden has plättar, tiny pancakes fried normally seven at a time in a pan called a plättlagg. Swedish thin pannkakor are traditionally eaten for lunch on Thursdays with pea soup. Iceland's pönnukökur are cooked on a special pan, and that pan is traditionally never washed or rinsed, not even with water. In Finland, one thick oven pancake from the Åland islands includes cardamom and is served mainly on Autonomy Day.

  In central Europe, the Czech palačinka, the Romanian clătită and the Hungarian palacsinta all come from the Latin placenta, meaning "cake." Hungary's Gundel palacsinta is stuffed with walnuts, zest, raisins and rum, then served in chocolate sauce and often flambéed. Austrian and Bavarian Kaiserschmarrn is torn into pieces and re-fried. In Swabia, pancakes sliced into ribbons, called Flädle, go into soup.

  In Brittany, the galette is a large, thin pancake of buckwheat flour, often cooked on one side only. Ireland's boxty is a potato pancake, commonly part of a Full Irish Breakfast.

  And in Nice, farinata, also called socca, is made from chickpea flour and black pepper and sold as street food.

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• 7. Americas and Oceania

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  Prospectors and pioneers in North America carried a pot of sourdough, because it could last indefinitely and needed only flour and water to replenish it. It let them make pancakes without buying yeast. Sourdough pancakes are now a particular speciality in Alaska.

  The typical American or Canadian stack is two or three pancakes with maple syrup and butter. The silver dollar pancake is much smaller, about 5 to 7 cm across, just a bit bigger than a pre-1979 silver dollar coin. A serving usually holds five to ten of them. The bowl-shaped German pancake, or Dutch baby, served in American pancake houses has its own variation. The David Eyre's pancake is named for the writer and editor David W. Eyre, who lived from 1912 to 2008. Newfoundland has toutons, small tall pancakes served with dark molasses.

  Johnnycake, a cornmeal flatbread, was an early American staple. Its modern form is stereotypically linked to Rhode Island. In the Dominican Republic, a fried relative called yaniqueques is a popular beach food.

  Mexican hotcakes are often made with cornmeal and sold by street vendors with toppings such as condensed milk or cajeta, a sweet goat milk spread. Crêpes arrived late in the 19th century, after the French intervention in Mexico. In Venezuela, cachapas are corn pancakes. Argentina and Uruguay fill panqueques with dulce de leche, or use them as the wrappers for cannelloni.

  In Brazil, tapioca is a pancake made from cassava starch. The heat of an ungreased pan makes the starchy grains fuse into a flatbread.

  Australia and New Zealand eat small pancakes called pikelets, about 75 mm across, at afternoon tea with jam and whipped cream. Australia's love of pancakes spawned franchise restaurants such as Pancake Parlour and Pancakes on the Rocks.

  One oddity belongs to the tropics. Pancake syndrome is an allergic reaction some people have after eating pancakes made with flour contaminated by certain mites.

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• 8. Feast Days and Races

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  Early Slavic peoples saw the round shape of blini and mlynci as a symbol of the sun. The preparation of these pancakes dates back to pagan traditions and feasts, and it is reflected in today's "pancake week," celebrated in winter before the Great Lent. Ashkenazi Jews made blintzes with a kosher cheese filling and no rennet, often served during Shavuot. Latkes, potato pancakes, can be part of Hanukkah. In Corfu and Patras, Greek teganites are customarily served on the feast days of Saint Spyridon and Saint Andrew. In Portugal, Galicia, Asturias and León, filloas are a typical Carnival dessert.

  In Britain and the Commonwealth, the great pancake date is Shrove Tuesday. It is called Pancake Day in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia. Ireland and Scotland also say Pancake Tuesday. The United States and France know it as Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday. Cooks historically made pancakes that day to use up the last fat or lard before Lent, a season when meat is not eaten.

  Schools and charities hold pancake races, in which every runner carries a pancake in a frying pan. They must toss it as they run and catch it again. Since 1950, the towns of Olney and Liberal, Kansas have competed each Shrove Tuesday in the International Pancake Race. Only local women may enter the main race, and their times are compared to name an international winner. Olney adds races for local schoolchildren and for men.

  The fun does not stop at town level. Every Shrove Tuesday, teams from the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the Fourth Estate compete in the Rehab UK Parliamentary Pancake Race. The relay raises awareness of the national brain injury charity Rehab UK and the needs of people with acquired brain injury.

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