Who invented pancakes

Honestly, every day should be pancake day, but today is the day that gets the official designation. For National Pancake Day, here are 10 facts you might not know about the lovely, fluffy breakfast favorites.

They were sold hot from vendors on the corners of the new market squares—the first version of our modern-day crepe stand, you might say. Rather than slathering them in syrup, they'd use honey to sweeten their pancakes. By the 15th century, many European countries made their own types of pancakes from scratch using a wide range of ingredients such as wheat, buckwheat, occasionally alcohol like wine or ale, and herbs and spices like cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

In 18th-century Friesland a province in the Netherlands the traditional wedding breakfast was pannenkoek with milk and honey. Pancake recipes from around the world create various forms, from the wafer-thin, buttery French crepe to the savory, crispier Japanese okonomiyaki. It's the last day before Lent, the traditional 40 days of abstinence before Easter practiced by Christians. This fluffy morning breakfast meal comes in a variety of styles and even more diversity when it comes to toppings.

Whether you like to add blueberries and other fancy toppings or keep it old school with a simple drizzle of syrup; pancakes are an easy additive to any breakfast spread. While this dish has graced our plates for as long as we can remember, its origins actually extend far beyond our modern culinary scene and will likely continue hundreds or thousands of years into the future as well. No matter what you call your pancakes - griddle cakes, hotcakes, flapjacks, or even slapjacks, the common ingredients have continued to be relatively consistent in western culture since biblical times.

Flour, eggs, and milk are common ingredients used to create a batter to make flat, rounded, disks cooked over a hot flat surface. While the toppings, grains, and the quality of milling may differ from one culture to another, the core concept of a pancake is the same now as it was thousands of years ago.

The combination of flour and other ingredients has resulted in the creation of more than different delicacies from around the world. Research suggests that our stone-age predecessors may have indulged in pancakes more than 30, years ago.

Through the use of grinding tools, stone age chefs created flour out of grains, and likely combined them with water to create what we all know today as pancakes. Whatever you choose to call them, these pan-fried circles of dough played a distinctive role in ancient diets. Often flavored with fruits and spices, these hotcakes were easy to make and have made their way to our tables today. While there are many recipes out there, the simplest recipes include ingredients like flour, eggs, milk, and baking powder.

The ingredients are mixed together into a thick batter and dropped in a pan of hot oil or butter. In ancient times, pancakes were seasoned with rosewater and sherry, and were structured with wheat flour and crudled milk. One of the benefits of pancakes is their sheer versatility. They were traditionally eaten in quantity on Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day, a day of feasting and partying before the beginning of Lent.

Pancakes were a good way to use up stores of about-to-be-forbidden perishables like eggs, milk, and butter, and a yummy last hurrah before the upcoming grim period of church-mandated fast. In the American colonies, pancakes—known as hoe cakes, johnnycakes, or flapjacks—were made with buckwheat or cornmeal.

The defining characteristic of the entire vast family of pancakes, however—from crepe to griddlecake, blini, bannock, and beyond—is flatness.

In , this recurrent comparison led a trio of geographers with senses of humor—after a dullish trip across the American Midwest—to attempt to determine the relative flatnesses of pancakes and Kansas. They constructed a topographic profile of a representative pancake—bought from the local International House of Pancakes—using digital imaging processing and a confocal laser microscope, and a similar profile of Kansas, using data from the United States Geological Survey.

The tongue-in-cheek results, published in the Annals of Improbable Research , showed that though pancakes are flat, Kansas is even flatter. Where, mathematically, a value of 1. The pancake, in contrast, scored a relatively lumpy 0.

In fact, there are several states that are even flatter. Their calculations showed that, of the continental states, flattest of the flat is Florida, followed by Illinois, North Dakota, Louisiana, Minnesota, and Delaware.

Compared to a Kansas-sized pancake—well, practically everything is flat. All rights reserved. Our prehistoric ancestors just may have eaten pancakes. Are pancakes British or American?

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