The History of Making Pancakes at Home: From Bakestone to Non-Stick Pan

Quick answer: British households have been cooking pancakes at home for centuries, but the method has changed completely. Cooks once made them on a flat stone or iron bakestone set over an open fire. The cast iron kitchen range moved the job onto a hob. The non-stick pan, invented in the 1950s, made scraping and re-greasing unnecessary. Packet mixes arrived later still, as a shortcut rather than a replacement. The batter itself (flour, eggs, milk) has barely changed at all.

Most of what gets written about Pancake Day covers where the tradition came from or how it is marked around the world. Less gets said about the practical side: what people actually cooked their pancakes on, at home, across the centuries. That story is really a story about British kitchen technology, and it explains a few things about pancake habits that survive today, including why "griddle" and "girdle" still turn up in recipe names, and why a good pan matters more for pancakes than for almost anything else you cook.

Before the pan: the bakestone

The earliest home-cooked pancakes were not made in a pan at all. They were cooked on a bakestone: a flat stone, or later a flat disc of cast iron, heated directly in the embers of an open hearth or set on a trivet over the fire. Once hot, a bakestone held its heat evenly and could cook one flat cake after another without needing to be reheated between batches, which made it well suited to a household feeding several people from one fire.

This method of cooking had different regional names depending on where you were in Britain: bakestone in Wales, girdle in Scotland and the north of England, griddle further south, though all three describe more or less the same object and technique. Before most households had an oven at all, the bakestone did the job that a modern grill pan or frying pan does now, and it produced flat, quick-cooking foods well beyond pancakes: Welsh cakes, singin' hinnies in the north east, and drop scones, still sold today as Scotch pancakes.

According to a well-worn English legend (impossible to verify and almost certainly embellished with retelling), Alfred the Great burned a batch of griddle cakes while sheltering from Viking forces in a woodcutter's cottage, distracted from the fire while planning his next move. True or not, the story only works because burning cakes on an open hearth was an entirely ordinary household risk. Bakestone cooking demanded constant attention: too far from the fire and the batter never set, too close and it caught.

The cast iron range changes the kitchen

The shift that mattered most for home pancake cooking was not the invention of a new pan, but the invention of a controllable heat source. Through the 18th and 19th centuries, open hearths in Britain were gradually replaced by enclosed cast iron kitchen ranges, fuelled by coal, which offered a flat hob surface and, for the first time in most homes, a reasonably steady heat that did not need constant feeding with fresh fuel. A heavy frying pan set directly on the range hob did much the same job as a bakestone, but with a heat source that behaved more predictably.

This is also when the frying pan, rather than the flat bakestone, became the default pancake tool in most English kitchens, while Scotland kept the girdle tradition alongside it for drop scones and oatcakes. The batter itself did not change; what changed was how evenly and how easily it could be cooked, which mattered a great deal on a night when a household was frying pancake after pancake to feed everyone before Lent.

Non-stick pans and the 20th-century kitchen

The next real change came from chemistry rather than kitchen design. Polytetrafluoroethylene, better known as PTFE, was patented in 1941 and trademarked by DuPont as Teflon in 1945, but it took another decade before anyone thought to put it on cookware. In 1954, the French engineer Marc Gregoire coated a frying pan with Teflon at his wife's suggestion; two years later he founded Tefal to sell the result, and the non-stick frying pan reached British kitchens not long after.

For pancakes specifically, this mattered more than it did for most other cooking. A thin British-style batter, cooked with little or no fat, is unforgiving on a pan that does not release cleanly, and a torn or stuck first pancake (long joked about as the one you write off) was a far more common outcome on bare cast iron or steel than it is on a modern non-stick surface. The choice of cooking surface is still one of the biggest variables in how a home pancake turns out, which is really a direct legacy of the bakestone-to-Teflon story.

The shortcut era: packet mixes

Ready-made mixes are the most recent chapter, and the least dramatic. Home baking brands had been selling powdered mixes for cakes and other bakes for most of the 20th century. Green's, one of the longest-running names in UK home baking, has been going since 1907 and today sells a ready-made pancake mix alongside its cake and dessert mixes, sitting on the same supermarket shelf a Pancake Day shopper would once have filled with flour and eggs bought separately.

What a packet mix actually changes is small: it pre-measures the dry ingredients and sometimes adds a raising agent, but a cook still has to add liquid, whisk, and fry it themselves. Compared to the jump from open hearth to cast iron range, or from a pan that sticks to one that does not, the packet mix is a convenience rather than a technological leap. It is worth noting mainly because it marks the point where making pancakes at home stopped requiring any specialist knowledge of flour ratios at all.

What has not changed

Set against all of that, the basic pancake batter (flour, egg, milk, worked into a thin loose mixture) has stayed almost exactly the same since the earliest bakestone cooks. The flour is finer than it would once have been, the milk more reliably fresh, and most people now measure by weight rather than by feel, but the ratio a modern British household uses is recognisably the one that would have been mixed for a girdle or bakestone centuries ago. It is the cooking surface and the heat source, not the recipe, that has done almost all of the changing.

That continuity is part of why Pancake Day still feels like a genuinely old tradition rather than a rebranded modern one. The reason for making pancakes on Shrove Tuesday has faded for most households, but the physical act (mixing a thin batter, tipping it into a hot pan, flipping it, doing it again) has been passed down largely unchanged, even as the pan underneath it went from stone, to iron, to Teflon.

Frequently asked questions

What did people cook pancakes on before frying pans?

A bakestone: a flat stone or disc of cast iron heated over an open fire, known regionally as a girdle in Scotland and northern England or a bakestone in Wales. It worked on the same principle as a modern flat griddle pan.

When did non-stick pans become common in British kitchens?

Non-stick cookware reached the market from 1956, after the French company Tefal began selling Teflon-coated frying pans. It took some years to become a standard household item, but by the later 20th century it had largely replaced bare cast iron and steel for everyday frying, including pancakes.

Is a Scotch pancake cooked differently from a British pancake?

Yes. A Scotch pancake is a small, thick, griddle-cooked cake made from a thicker batter with a raising agent, closer in method to the historic girdle tradition. A classic British pancake is thin, unleavened, and cooked in a shallow layer in a frying pan.

Did people always use packet mixes to make pancakes?

No. Ready-made pancake mixes are a comparatively recent convenience. Home baking brands such as Green's, established in 1907, built their business on powdered mixes over the course of the 20th century, but for most of pancake history in Britain, batter was mixed from flour, eggs, and milk measured at home.

Has the pancake batter recipe itself changed over time?

Not much. The core ratio of flour, egg, and milk in a British pancake batter has stayed broadly consistent for centuries. What has changed is the equipment used to cook it, from bakestones and cast iron ranges to modern non-stick pans, rather than the recipe itself.

Why do some pancake recipes still mention a griddle or girdle?

Because the terms describe a genuinely different cooking method, not just an old-fashioned word for a frying pan. Griddle and girdle cooking uses a flat, ungreased or lightly greased surface for thicker batters like drop scones, and the terminology has simply carried on being used for that style of cooking.