Are pancakes British or American? The food history of who invented the pancake

The short answer: Pancakes are neither British nor American. They are one of the oldest cooked foods in human history — found in ancient Greece, Rome, and across the medieval world long before either Britain or America existed as a nation. What differs by country is the style: thin, lacy British and French versions; thick, fluffy American and Dutch versions; crisp Indian and Ethiopian versions. The dish itself belongs to nobody.

This question comes up surprisingly often, and the answer is more interesting than the question. Pancakes are older than agriculture in some forms — flour-and-water dough fried on a hot stone is one of the earliest things humans cooked. The British and American pancakes that people now argue about are very late branches of a very old tree.

Ancient origins: Greece, Rome, and earlier

The earliest documented pancake-like foods date to around 600 BC. The ancient Greeks ate τηγανίτης (tagēnitēs) — flour, olive oil, honey, and curdled milk, fried on a hot pan. The poet Cratinus mentions them in the 5th century BC; the physician Galen describes them being eaten for breakfast. The name comes from tēganon, the Greek word for a frying pan — almost identical in meaning to the English "pancake".

The Romans ate alita dolcia — sweet pancakes flavoured with honey and pepper, recorded in the cookbook attributed to Apicius. Versions of the same dish appear in medieval Arab, Persian, and Chinese cookery. Almost every culture that had wheat or another grain, milk or another liquid, and a hot surface to cook on, independently invented something pancake-shaped.

Medieval England — the first "pancake"

The English word pancake is first recorded in the 15th century. By the time of Shakespeare it was a common household dish — referenced in All's Well That Ends Well ("a pancake for Shrove Tuesday") and in Tudor cookery manuscripts. The medieval English pancake was thin, made with flour, eggs, milk, and a knob of butter, fried in fat, and eaten on Shrove Tuesday to use up rich foods before Lent.

The same dish, with regional variation, existed across Christian Europe — French crêpes, Russian blini, Polish naleśniki, Hungarian palacsinta. The British pancake is essentially the English form of a pan-European medieval food.

American pancakes — a 19th-century divergence

What Americans now think of as a pancake — thick, fluffy, raised with baking powder, eaten in a stack with butter and maple syrup — is a 19th-century innovation, distinct from the older European thin pancake.

Two things changed it. First, baking powder, introduced commercially in the United States in the 1850s by Eben Norton Horsford, gave cooks a reliable chemical leavener that produced a thick, risen pancake without yeast or whipped egg whites. Second, buttermilk was abundant on American farms as a by-product of butter-making, and its acidity reacted with baking powder to produce an even fluffier crumb. The combination of buttermilk and baking powder is what made the American pancake distinctively American.

The thick, leavened pancake also has Dutch and Native American precursors. Dutch settlers in the 17th century brought pannenkoeken (similar to British pancakes, thin and flexible). Indigenous peoples of North America made cornmeal flatbreads, and nokehick — a parched cornmeal cake — became one of the inputs into early American "Indian cakes" and "johnnycakes". By the 19th century, the American pancake had absorbed elements from English, Dutch, and Native American cookery, and added baking powder to produce something genuinely new.

The two pancakes today

The modern division between "British" and "American" pancakes reflects this history.

• British pancake — thin, lacy, unleavened. Flour, eggs, milk, salt, butter for the pan. Closer to a French crêpe than to anything fluffy. Eaten with lemon and caster sugar in the classic version. See our classic British pancake recipe.
• American pancake — thick, fluffy, leavened with baking powder. Often made with buttermilk. Eaten in stacks of three or four with butter and maple syrup. See our American buttermilk stack.

For a side-by-side recipe comparison of the two, see American vs British pancakes.

The rest of the world's pancakes

It is worth pointing out — given how often the British/American argument is treated as if those were the only options — that almost every food culture has its own pancake. A short list:

• French crêpe — even thinner than the British pancake; can be sweet or savoury (the savoury version is called a galette, made with buckwheat).
• Russian blini — small, thick, yeasted; eaten with sour cream, jam, or caviar.
• Indian dosa — fermented rice and lentil batter, crisp and large; often filled with spiced potato.
• Ethiopian injera — fermented teff flour, spongy and sour, used as both pancake and edible plate.
• Japanese okonomiyaki — savoury cabbage pancake, topped with mayonnaise, sauce, and bonito flakes.
• Korean pajeon — scallion pancake, often with seafood.
• Dutch pannenkoeken — thin, large, sweet or savoury.
• Hungarian palacsinta — thin, rolled, filled with jam or curd cheese.
• Mexican / Latin American tortillas, arepas, and pupusas — corn-based flatbreads with pancake characteristics.

Each of these is older than the modern British/American distinction. Each was invented independently or evolved from an earlier flatbread tradition. The pancake is, in a sense, a near-universal solution to the question of what to do with flour, liquid, and a hot pan.

So whose pancake is it?

The honest answer is that the pancake belongs to no single nation. The thin pancake belongs to medieval Europe broadly and has British, French, Russian, Polish, and Hungarian variants. The thick pancake belongs to 19th-century America and has Dutch and Native American precursors. Both are recent compared to the 2,500-year-old Greek τηγανίτης.

The argument about which version is "proper" is essentially a stylistic one — and on that, every nation is entitled to its own answer. In Britain, the pancake is thin and the answer is lemon and sugar. In America, it is thick and the answer is butter and maple syrup. Both are right. Neither is more authentic. The pancake itself does not care.