The Origin Of Pancakes Goes Back Further Than We Thought

Pancakes are a favorite culinary treat around the world. Granted, they come in many different sizes and flavors, but the appeal of flattened griddle cakes is clearly universally appealing. Of course, there are American-style flapjacks that we love to drown in rivers of butter and syrup; there are also French crepes, Ethiopian injera, Russian blinis, Chinese jianbing, Moroccan msemen (they're square, like these flaky almond pancakes), Finnish pannukakku, and roti, which is a staple in India as well as the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and some African countries. Kind of makes you wonder who thought up the pancake in the first place.

Some might give the credit to the ancient Greeks, with good reason. The first recorded mention of a food resembling a pancake dates back to the 600s B.C. (around 2600 years ago) from a poet named Cratinus. He wrote about "a [flat cake] hot and shedding morning dew." But in 2022, archeologists unearthed the 70,000-year-old remnants of pancake-like food extracted from a cave in Iraq, suggesting that flat cakes griddled over a heat source are much older than we realized. The food remains were burnt and found in the Zagros Mountains in the northern part of the country. Scientists believe the cakes were made using seeds, some of which were also found on-site. The experts believed that the seeds were possibly soaked in order to soften them before they were made into cakes. 

As more archaeological discoveries were made and written records of pancakes were found, ingredients evolved based on where these accounts came from. And, of course, sweet toppings were added.

Archeologists also found evidence of pancakes made with millet in Xinjiang, China, which they dated between 500 and 300 B.C. Several hundreds of years later, in the 2nd century, a Greek doctor named Galen wrote a recipe book, "On the Properties of Foodstuffs," in which he described "griddle cakes," and how to make them, which basically entailed a mixture of water and flour that was cooked in olive oil. He also mentioned that they were served with warm honey.

The food we know as pancakes weren't referred to by that name until the Middle Ages, suggesting that pancakes were still being enjoyed even centuries after the very earliest discoveries. And it's easy to see why such a food would be so widely attractive around the globe; being made of primarily flour and liquid, pancakes could be made cheaply and with a number of ingredients. Flour can be made from wheat, rice, corn, even legumes; chickpea flour is used to make Italian farinata, another type of pancake. Jewish latkes are made with potatoes; Indian dosa is made with rice and lentils.

Even American-style pancakes are sometimes made with cornmeal, buckwheat, or oatmeal, which early American colonists used to make the dish. Clearly, the influence on the earliest pancakes tends to stay with us in some ways.