Pancakes

If you are fond of passionate, chauvinistic fights, question the origin of the thin pancakes known as crêpes in France, Palatschinken in Austria, palačinky in Czechoslovakia and palacsinta in Hungary. If you have enough time to bone up on the subject before this four-nation Pancake Olympics, you will find that each nation can produce enough supporting data to prove that this delicacy was created by a Frenchman, an Austrian, a Czech or a Hungarian.

Actually, this pancake did not originate in any of those nations, but seems to have come from Rumania. The oldest recorded source is a Roman manuscript, which talks about placenta, a round cake. Roman legions invaded ancient Dacia, which was eventually conquered and became a province of the Empire. Many legionnaires stayed on to become ancestors of today’s Rumanians. The flat pancake was not invented by the Romans, for the Egyptians had it before that, but we can credit those legionaries with carrying the pancake idea around Europe. Pancakes became popular in Rumania in a primitive form about a thousand years ago. In Hungary they were known considerably later, but pancake making developed into a very subtle and complex art in Hungarian and Austrian kitchens during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.