There are some foods that are not only loved by everyone, but claimed by every nation, claiming to be the oldest, the most original and all that. The most prestigious representative of this category is pancakes, which is consumed daily on every continent except the South Pole, but perhaps also there. Today is World Pancake Day.
Considering how easy it is to make and how few ingredients are needed, it's no wonder it's become so popular. Flour, eggs and liquid are readily available in most places, and if you fry it all up, possibly in lard, you have a delicious base that you can fill, cut and fold as you like.
People realised this thirty thousand years ago. They probably didn't have pancake ovens, but they mixed seeds ground into flour with stones and water and fried them on hot stones. From then on, this flatbread has accompanied us throughout history in one form or another, eaten with honey by the Greeks and Romans and wrapped in meat by the legionaries. I've also read that it was supposed to have been cooked on a hot griddle, but I understand that they were using wooden griddles at the time, so I have reservations about the latter information.
If the Romans once ate it, it is logical that it would have gone everywhere the Roman Empire reached, so the pancakes established a foothold in the Danube basin, and later in what is now Germany, France and England. The first mention of it in Hungarian comes from the late 16th century, from the notes of a Transylvanian chef. The name is derived from the Latin word placenta, with several twists and turns.
I really like the way I suddenly find out the reason for something that is treated as a fact. Until now, I've never connected the fact that today is World Pancake Day and tomorrow is the beginning of Lent, even though the two are closely related. It's easier to get through Lent if you clean out the pantry and get rid of the things on the banned list beforehand, and pancakes are a great way to use up eggs, milk and butter or lard. So the day before Ash Wednesday became World Pancake Day.
I don't want to list recipes, because on the one hand, everyone has their own tried and tested trick, and on the other hand, you can find thousands of them on the internet. But it's worth mentioning that we use the flour-liquid-egg trinity as a base, in America they add baking powder, which makes it so sweetly puffy, and then they pour some really sweet stuff over it. In Russia and France it's made with yeast, in Mexico it's called a tortilla, and in Malaysia it's a beautiful green colour. The possibilities are almost endless, and the fillings are endless.
Every restaurant in Hungary has it on the menu, and of course we have the great classics, Gundel, which is not Gundel, and hortobágyi, which is not hortobágyi. The idea for the former actually sprang from the mind of Sándor Márai's wife when she wanted to create something really big for the premiere of her husband's play, Adventure, and only after the Márais emigrated to Hungary did the name Gundel become Gundel, when it was more appropriate to change the name of this sublime dessert.
And the Hortobágy meat pancake is often thought to have been invented for the 1958 Brussels World Fair, but the twice-baked pancake stuffed with stewed beef appeared in cookery books as early as around 1909. The prefix hortobágyi was actually given to it in 1958, to make it sound more Hungarian, and it was already a pusztaromantika.
The bottom line is that the pancakes good, the pancakes are delicious, whether tossed or flipped with a spatula (believe it or not, for many this is a cardinal issue). I'm going to go and cook it...
