Ah, crêpes! Can anyone resist these wonderfully thin and tasty treats, right out of the pan onto your plate, ready to be spread with your favorite jam, lemon juice and sugar, or, especially for the youngsters in the family, that chocolaty heaven called Nutella®. No. Of course not. Crêpes are everyone’s favorite, and not just in France, where crêpes are considered to be the national dish of Brittany (would Normandy agree?), but almost everywhere your travels take you. Spain loves crêpes. You find them in Sweden, Germany, Russia, Italy, and a dozen or so other countries as well.

Now, being such a delicious, versatile and easy to make menu item, one would think that libraries and data bases would be brim full of scholarly works tracking the origins, history, and modern uses of this delightful food. But, curiously enough, that does not seem to be the case, at least not in this writer’s experience. If there is a comprehensive, well documented and definitive work on crêpes, this writer has yet to stumble onto it. Which leads one to wonder, Why? Are crêpes not important enough? Oh please! We’re talking about a food as famous as the Eiffel Tower, as familiar to the world as the Champs-Elysées, as universal as Notre Dame, as emotion evoking as Paris itself! So, it can’t be that crêpes aren’t important enough. Perhaps it’s as simple as this – no one has gotten around to being outright scholarly about the world’s thinest pancakes.

So, having mentioned what we don’t have, on the origin of crêpes, here’s what we do have. One source suggests that crêpes have been around since biblical times, when thin batter was cooked by pouring it onto hot stones. Now I’m not suggesting that people didn’t cook batter on hot stones a couple of thousand years ago. I’m just not prepared to say that the result was a crêpe, that’s all. Here’s another, more plausible beginning for crêpes. Sometime during the 12^th century buckwheat found its way from Hunan Province in China to the northwest part of France, where it thrived and could be made into flour. This flour, when made into a batter, is the basic ingredient of the crêpes made to this day in Brittany, the area south of Normandy that bulges out into the Atlantic.

It wasn’t until the early part of the 19th century that white flour became cheap enough to be used more generally in France. And even though traditional Brittany crêpes are still made with buckwheat flour, it is white flour that, by and large, is the main ingredient for the crêpes we know and love today. Once white flour crêpes became available throughout France, it didn’t take long for them to spread to other countries and cultures, and for creative recipes to pop up here, there and everywhere. For instance, probably the most famous crêpe dish is called crêpes Suzette.

Crêpes Suzette is supposed to have been created by the famous French chef Henri Charpentier in 1894. At that time Charpentier was a 14 year old assistant waiter who was asked to prepare a special dessert for the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) during a visit to Monaco. Charpentier made crêpes and put them in a sauce made with orange juice, butter, sugar, Cointreau, kirsch, orange flour water and cognac. The sauce accidentlly caught fire, but the result was so delicious the prince asked that the dish be named for a young girl in his entourage. Of course, no one knows if the story is really true, but the fact is that crêpes Suzette, made at table-side in most up-scale restaurants, continues to dazzle all but the most blasé restaurant goers to this day.

So is this a definitive history of our delicious friend, the crêpe? Certainly not. But it does give a little glimpse into the life and times of this great food. So let me ask the question again – Anyone for Crêpes?