Pancake Day

The pancake trade certainly isn’t what it used to be. In grand restaurants, crêpes – aux fruits de mer, Suzettes, soufflés – were a pillar of the culinary repertoire and an essential feature in the performance art of the gueridon. In the 1970s they became an increasingly popular element of the bistro menu (a blend of stodge and sauce that I never found appealing) and made a bid for fast-food immortality in the form of the crêperie. However, the crêpe, although endowed with many of the same virtues as the pizza, such as speed of service, low cost, multiple variations on a single theme and impeccable European credentials, never came to terms with its rival and is now rarely seen.