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       4 Crêpe souls

      ‘YOU WANT TO MAKE LOTS OF PANCAKES?’ Mrs H repeated in a disbelieving tone. ‘Er, why?’

      Maybe pancakes aren’t the most exciting of foods, though some are better than others. A crêpe stall rarely fails to attract my custom, and I am particularly partial to the galette, a Breton speciality made from buckwheat flour. Though pancakes were lifted by the invention of baking powder in the nineteenth century, they remain a primitive dish. As Alan Davidson points out in The Oxford Companion to Food, ‘The griddle method of cooking is older than oven baking and pancakes are an ancient form.’ There is a primal satisfaction about food that is cooked in an instant and consumed an instant after that. This is particularly so with drop scones or Scotch pancakes, eulogised by Davidson (‘this excellent pancake’). Where better to start my pancake adventures?

      My first renditions of drop scones were a bit too primitive and ancient, but eventually they stopped tasting like shoe soles. Whipped off the pan after a few seconds on each side, there is a delicious contrast between the lightly tanned exterior and the soft, sweet, creamy inside. Davidson insists that these delicacies are ‘best eaten warm with butter or jam or both’, but in my view the main thing you need with a freshly made drop scone is more drop scones. Especially when a sprinkling of dried fruit is added to the mix, they can be a seriously addictive snack. A frequent treat of my Yorkshire childhood, these sultana-gemmed nibbles have lost none of their appeal.

      The main problem with drop scones is when do you have them? Not quite right for breakfast, lunch or dinner, they are perfect for that forgotten delight, the high tea. The only time I’ve had high tea in recent years was at a Scottish castle, where Scotch pancakes formed part of a massive late afternoon spread. I didn’t tackle dinner with my customary gusto. Still, judging by Mrs H’s coolness towards these tasty splats (‘I haven’t cooked them since school and I don’t particularly want to start now’), I doubt if I will face this problem very frequently.

      The difficulty about time of consumption also applies to the conventional pancake. Once or twice I’ve eaten them for breakfast in America in the form of a big stack dripping with maple syrup. This oozy construction is so substantial – it resembles the Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood – that you feel like going back to bed immediately afterwards. Pancakes are better eaten later in the day, especially if that day is Shrove Tuesday. While the Latin world enjoys the unfettered orgy of Mardi Gras, the British tuck into pancakes in an atmosphere hazy with particulates. Though I’ve tried any number of ways with pancakes, I always come back to the traditional partnership of lemon juice and sugar. The lemon counteracts the sweetness of the pancake, while the sugar neutralises the acidity of the lemon. There is also a distinctive combination of sensations: hot pancake, cold lemon juice and the crunch of partially dissolved sugar.

      As I remarked, it is customarily Mrs H who stands at the stove on Shrove Tuesday. Wreathed in smoke, she bears a passing resemblance to St Joan. ‘I never get to eat one because I’m always making them,’ moans this modern martyr. ‘I hear noises from the table like a cuckoo: “Feed me. Feed me.” By the time I get to eat mine, you’ve finished and you say “Can I have a bit of yours?” No, I don’t like making them. My clothes always smell of oil afterwards. Pancakes are all right but I wouldn’t want to do them more than once a year.’

      I embarked on my first-ever pancake by making batter, which you have to let stand for an hour or so. Even this most instantaneous of foods demands a degree of forward planning. I used a non-stick frying pan, but the technique came from The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse (1747): ‘Pour in a ladleful of batter, moving the pan round that the batter be all over the pan…when you think that side is enough, toss it; if you can’t, turn it cleverly.’ I turned cleverly enough for my pancakes to earn Mrs H’s damning-by-faint-praise: ‘Quite nice.’ The lemon-and-sugar pancake starts light, but ends up as a substantial dessert. The first one disappears as if by magic. Then you take a second and probably a third onboard and begin to feel well ballasted. With this treat as the dessert, it is unwise to have a large quantity of savoury pancakes as the main course. Maybe you shouldn’t have savoury pancakes at any time. It is a dish that lies heavy on the plate and heavy in the stomach. Yorkshire puddings without ambition.

      ‘Thank goodness we’ve got that over with,’ Mrs H said after my exploration of the British pancake. ‘Crêpes are much better than those doughy things.’ Who is going to argue with that? Ever since we had some holidays in Brittany, when I ate them once a day, sometimes twice, I’ve had a hankering for the crêpe (from the Old French crespe, meaning curled) and the buckwheat galette (imaginatively derived from galet, a worn pebble good for skimming). The problem with making them at home is that, until recently, we did not have a large enough pan. Though fine for an English pancake, our non-stick frying pan produces only a mini-crêpe. A professional electric crêpe maker, as used on crêpe stalls, costs around £250, which seemed a little excessive to bring back memories of St Malo. The solution materialised when we were mooching round a Le Creuset shop in York. In one corner, I came across a pile of cast-iron crêpe pans. Measuring twenty-six centimetres in diameter, with a lip running round the edge, it had a pleasing heft in the hand and radiated homespun Gallic wholesomeness. From the instant I got it on the hob, I felt sure that my crêpes were going to be the stuff of legend.

      Confident that I’d mastered the pancake, I thought that it would not take long to get the knack of the crêpe. In order to learn the rudiments, I took an informal lesson by hanging around a crêpe stall in a French market that visited our corner of London. First,

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