Pancake Cookbooks for Mardi Gras

On February 24th we get to celebrate Mardi Gras, a holiday with several other names including Shrove Tuesday (as we called it my family), Fat Tuesday, Carnival or simply Pancake day. There are a great many traditions surrounding the holiday but I wanted to focus the eating of pancakes.

The original reason for eating pancakes on Fat Tuesday was so that Christians could use up the last for their rich foods (eggs, milk, sugar, lard etc) before they began the fasting of lent, and if you dump these forbidden ingredients in bowl with flour and water pancakes are what emerge.

My mother and I always ate pancakes for dinner on Shrove Tuesday, my father being of the camp that thought pancakes were breakfast food. He boycotted the event for several years before eventually realizing that our pancake feast vastly outdid whatever he was willing to scrounge up on his own and he slunk back to the family dinner table and realized that little can make you happier than to devour ones weight in ham and cheese crepe goodness.

If you are looking to make some traditional hotcakes on Pancake Tuesday you have a number of options. You make them out of whole wheat, buckwheat, or regular flour; mix flavors into the batter like blueberries or nuts; and top them with everything from fresh fruit, lemon and sugar, or any number of syrups (corn, maple, cream cheese). There are more flapjack cookbooks then words for griddlecakes but here are a couple of options.

Posh Pancakes and Fancy Fritters by Helen V. Fisher

The Pancake Handbook by Stephen Siegelman

The Totally Pancakes & Waffles Cookbook by Helene Siegel

Pancakes A to Z by Marie Simmons

Now if you are tired of the traditional and want to expand your horizons pancakes are a worldwide phenomenon, here are just a few worldwide pancake applications.

The French crepe is made with a similar batter to traditional (English) pancakes but is thinner and is wrapped around any variety of sweet and savory fillings. You can’t walk a block in Paris without tripping over a crepery trying to sell you a ham, egg and cheese crepe but seafood, jams, fruits, and other meats are also good choices. Eastern European also has a similar version called the Blin or Blintz which differs from a crepe in that it is made with yeast where a crepe is not. A complete explanation of both and recipes can be found in Belins & Crepes by Camille Le Foll

                              

            Crepes                                          Blintz                                          Raggmuk

A wide variety of pancake are eaten in Scandinavia, many of which are similar to English pancakes and crepes however they also have raggmunk which are a potato pancake as well as saffron pancakes which are made with rice and baked in the oven. While I don’t have a copy to check you should be able to find recipes for most of these options in Scandinavian Feasts: Celebrating Traditions throughout the Year by Beatrice A. Ojakangas .

Jewish Latkes are another great potato pancake, Jewish Holiday Feasts by Jeannette Ferrary has the recipe for these traditional Hanukkah treat

               
             Latkes                                       Arapas                                     Pupusas

Not just limited to European cooking the pancake can also be found in Latin America there are a variety of corn flour based treats. Columbian arapas, Mexican gorditas and Salvadorian pupusas are just a few, all of which are usually served with savoury fillings from casseroles, beans, cheese, and meats.   The South American Table by Maria Baez Kijac has a number of arapas recipes to try.

In Malaysia, Singapore, and China they serve a type of pancake called Ban Chian Kuih or Apom Balik (in Chinese or Malay respectively) which are traditionally filled ground peanut and alternatively egg, coconut, cheese, fruits, chocolate, and condensed milk. I couldn’t find a cookbook to suggest where I could guarantee a recipe, but fortunately I did find this recipe online thanks to the Malaysia Star.

Koreans also have several types of pancakes including jeon, which incorporates vegetables or meat mixed into a flour batter, as well as bindaetteok a mung bean pancake, and hotteok a pancake made with yeast and then stuffed with fillings. I personally love jeon and find it good alone or with a generous helping of Korean BBQ pork. In Japan you can get something similar called Okonomiyaki which roughly translates to "cook what you like,".. You should be able to find recipes for most of these in Discovering Korean Cuisine: Recipes from the Best Korean Restaurants in Los Angeles by Allisa Park

Heading a little further south to Vietnam you can find a crepe style pancake called bánh xèo which is made with rice flour, water and turmeric powder which is then stuffed with pork, shrimp, bean sprouts and herbs. Cambodians call this banh chiao, and you can learn to make it in Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors by Andrea Quynhgiao Nguyen

 

        Apam-Balik                            Jeon                          Okonomiyaki                    banh-xeo

If you have a further interest in Pancakes and how they have impacted the world read Pancake: A Global History by Ken Albala, where he traces the history of the pancake back to Greek and Roman times and even includes the oldest existing official pancake recipe, from a Dutch cook from the sixteenth century…

At first I was just going to make crepes, but after writing this I think I'm going to have to have a full pancake week.

Comments

[braciole]

You forgot South Indian dosas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dosa

[Scott Laming]

Oh dosa's do sound good. But your right I knew there was no way I had covered everything. I know that there is a type of pancake eaten in Ethiopian cuisine too, and so many regional variations. I think that’s what makes food so interesting. Perhaps I'll have to make a follow up post.

[Cris]

O what a pretty sight.