It’s Pancake Day! Here’s The True Origin Story Of The Delightful Breakfast Item

Some researchers have analyzed starch grains on 30,000-year-old grinding tools and have found that cooks in the stone age may have been making flour out of cattails and ferns. Researchers suspect that this was likely mixed with water and baked on a hot, and most likely greased, rock.

The result was probably similar to hardtack than the pancake variations we now consume today however the process and idea were the same. It would be a flat cake made from batter and then fried.

Pancake Day 

By the time Otzi the Iceman made his final hike 5,300 years ago, pancakes seemed to have become a common delicacy. Otzi’s remains were found in a rocky gully in the Italian Alps in 1991 and it provided researchers with a wealth of information about what those from the neolithic era ate.

His last meals were red deer, ibex and ground einkorn wheat consumed with bits of charcoal, suggesting that it was cooked over an open fire. Regardless of how old primal pancakes are, it is now clear that it is an ancient form of food because there is evidence of it in cultural traditions across the globe.

The ancient Greeks and Romans ate pancakes that had been sweetened with honey while the Elizabethans consumed them flavored with spices, rosewater, sherry, and apples. They would be eaten in large quantities on Shrove Tuesday or Pancake day, which is a day of feasting and partying before the start of Lent.

Pancakes presented a great way to use up bulks of about-to-be-banned perishables like egg, milk and butter. It was also a great last hurrah before the church-mandated fast took off in earnest. In America, pancakes were made with buckwheat or cornmeal.

Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery—a cookbook published in 1796—has two recipes for pancakes. One is for “Johnny Cake, or Hoe Cake,” and it requires milk, “Indian meal,” and molasses, while the other is for “Indian Slapjack,” which does not use molasses, but adds four eggs.

Thomas Jefferson was fond of pancakes and sent a recipe home to Monticello from the President’s House in Washington, D.C. It was picked up from Etienne Lemaire, his French maître d’hotel. Lemaire’s "panne-quaiques" were similar to crepes and were made by pouring dollops of thin batter into a hot pan. While Jefferson lived, modern pancakes were called griddle cakes and they generally contain a leavening agent and are heftier and puffier.