A history of pancake recipes – from Elizabethan ale to the invention of self-raising flour

Pieter Aertsen's The Pancake Bakery (1560). Wikimedia

With Pancake Day fast approaching, let’s go back in time to look at the history of the humble dish.

Recipes from the first published cookbooks show that in England, pancakes were made very thinly – hence the phrase “flat as a pancake” – from lots of wet ingredients that were forbidden during the impending pre-Easter Lenten Fast. Eggs, cream, butter and animal fats are all products from which people were meant to abstain, alongside all other meats.