The Continental Crêperie

Since every culture on Earth can lay claim to some version of the pancake, it takes quite a bit of moxie to declare that pancakes of the very, very thin variety are singularly French. Of course they do it, and just maybe they have justification. The French invented those very shallow crêpe-flipping pans and the little wooden batter spreaders…eh, maybe that’s enough to earn you bragging rights.

But cast your eye about the Continent and you’ll see some very similar things. The original French home of the crêpe, so it’s said, is Brittany where they’re famous for a savory buckwheat variety they call a galette. Yet cast your eyes a few hundred miles to the East and you find a very, very similar thing called a blintz. Same idea, an ultra-thin, unleavened buckwheat pancake, though granted, it’s folded differently. A few hundred more miles and you’ve got blini, which again are nearly identical (and likewise darn good eatin’). So who’s to say who owns the hyper-thin, buckwheat wrapper-pancake? Oh who am I kidding? The French of course. You can never win an argument with those people.