A single pancake on a rough stone slab with ancient wheat ears and stone-ground flour, sepia-toned

Pancake Tuesday

The History
of Pancakes

Not the history of Shrove Tuesday — the history of the pancake itself. This is a fully sourced account of the pancake as a food, from a 14,400-year-old flatbread in the Jordanian desert to Ancient Greek tagenites, medieval English recipes, and the accidental invention of the non-stick pan. Every claim below is backed by a real, checkable source.

The short version

Pancakes are one of the oldest prepared foods in human history — grain batter cooked on a hot, flat surface is about as simple as cooking gets, which is exactly why it turns up independently, again and again, everywhere humans have grown grain. The earliest confirmed flatbread dates to roughly 14,400 years ago, thousands of years before farming existed. Ancient Greeks and Romans wrote recipes for pancake-like dishes. Medieval English cooks left written instructions by the 1430s. And nearly every culture with access to grain flour — Ethiopia, India, Russia, the Americas — developed its own version, on its own timeline, with no single common ancestor.

The Pancake Timeline

PeriodMilestone
~70,000 years agoNeanderthals at Shanidar Cave, Iraq, pound and cook wild pulses and grains into a flat mass — the earliest known evidence of anything resembling a cooked grain cake.
~14,400 years agoNatufian hunter-gatherers at Shubayqa 1, Jordan, bake flatbread from wild wheat, barley and tuber flour — the oldest confirmed flatbread, predating farming by 4,000 years.
~5,300 years agoÖtzi the Iceman’s last meal includes unmilled einkorn wheat, found in his stomach by researchers in 2018.
5th century BCGreek comic poets Cratinus and Magnes write about τηγανίτης (tagenites) — pancakes fried in oil and served with honey.
1st century ADRoman cookbook De Re Coquinaria (attributed to Apicius) records a fried wheat-and-milk cake served with honey and pepper.
c.1393Le Ménagier de Paris records one of the earliest known written "crespes" recipes: flour, eggs, water, salt and wine, fried thin in lard.
c.1400The word "pancake" first appears in English, in the medical glossary Alphita.
c.1430An English recipe collection (Harleian MS 279) gives instructions to "makyst a pancake" — among the earliest English-language pancake instructions known.
1608Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre mentions "flap-jacks" — the most famous early citation of the word, though not its origin.
1615Gervase Markham publishes "The Best Pancake" recipe in The English Huswife, spiced with cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg.
1610sThe earliest solid documentary record of Russian blini appears in the Tsar’s royal kitchen ledgers.
1888–89A Missouri flour mill launches the first commercial ready-mix pancake batter in the US, later marketed as Aunt Jemima.
1938 / 1954DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett accidentally discovers PTFE (Teflon); French engineer Marc Grégoire later applies it to the first non-stick frying pans.
1958IHOP (International House of Pancakes) is founded in Toluca Lake, California.
1994The world’s largest pancake — 15.01 metres across, roughly 3 tonnes — is baked in Rochdale, UK.

The Four Eras

Prehistory – 500 AD

Ancient Origins: Prehistory to Rome

A 14,400-year-old flatbread baked by hunter-gatherers in the Jordanian desert, Ötzi the Iceman’s last meal, and the Greek poets who wrote odes to pancakes dripping in honey.

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c.1200 – 1700

Medieval & Early Modern Pancakes

The first time "pancake" appears in English, the oldest surviving written recipe, and the Shakespeare line that gave us the word "flapjack."

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Independently invented, worldwide

A Global Family Tree

Russian blini, Ethiopian injera, Indian dosa, American flapjacks — pancakes were invented separately, again and again, on almost every continent.

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1850 – today

The Industrial & Modern Era

The first ready-mix batter, the accidental invention of the non-stick pan, and the world record for the largest pancake ever baked (15 metres across).

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Common Questions

What is the oldest known pancake?+
The oldest confirmed evidence of a flatbread cooked from grain flour comes from Shubayqa 1 in northeastern Jordan, where archaeologists found charred crumbs of unleavened flatbread made from wild wheat, barley, and tuber flour, dated to roughly 14,400 years ago — about 4,000 years before farming existed. There is earlier, less certain evidence too: a 2023 study found Neanderthals at Shanidar Cave in Iraq were pounding and cooking wild grains and pulses into a flat mass as far back as 70,000 years ago, though researchers describe this as a cooked plant food rather than a confirmed "pancake."
Who invented the pancake?+
No single person or culture invented the pancake. The evidence points to independent invention in many places: flatbreads and griddle cakes made from grain batter appear in the archaeological and written record across Ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, Ethiopia, India, Russia, and pre-Columbian North America, developing separately wherever people had grain flour, water or milk, and a hot surface to cook on. See our guide to the pancake’s global family tree for the detail, country by country.
Are pancakes older than bread?+
They share the same origin. The Shubayqa 1 discovery in Jordan (c.14,400 years ago) is often described as both "the oldest bread" and "the oldest flatbread" in press coverage of the study — there is no meaningful distinction at that point in history between an unleavened flatbread and what we would now call a pancake. Leavened, risen bread is a later development; flat, griddle-cooked bread came first.
When did the word "pancake" first appear in English?+
Around 1400, in a medieval Latin-English glossary called Alphita, according to both the Oxford English Dictionary and Etymonline. The word is a simple compound of "pan" and "cake." A dedicated English-language pancake recipe appears about 30 years later, in the manuscript collection Harleian MS 279 (c.1430).
Was Aunt Jemima the first pancake mix?+
It’s widely credited as the first ready-mix pancake batter sold commercially in the United States, launched in 1888–89 as "Self-Rising Pancake Flour" by a Missouri flour mill. The Aunt Jemima branding, added later that year and drawn from a blackface minstrel song, has a well-documented racist history — acknowledged by its then-owner Quaker Oats/PepsiCo when the brand was retired in 2020 and renamed Pearl Milling Company in 2021. See our industrial-era history for the full, unsanitised timeline.

Related reading: Why we eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday · Shrove Tuesday traditions around the world · Glossary · Recipes

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