Crème Caramel

In Spanish or Latin restaurants, crème caramel is sometimes called flan. But if you ask for flan in a French pastry shop, you’ll get something totally different—a kind of starchy and pie-shaped sweet custard, sold in wedges. In fancy restaurants a flan can be any kind of custard, sweet or savory. And you won’t find crème caramel on a French menu (at least in France), because in France it’s called crème renversée, which means “inverted” or “turned over,” which is what you do to get it out of the molds.