Medieval & Early Modern Pancakes

The word “pancake”

“Pancake” is a simple compound — pan plus cake — and it's a genuinely old word. Etymonline records the first appearance around 1400, as “panne-cake,” in Middle English. The Oxford English Dictionary's entry places the earliest evidence in Alphita, a medieval Latin–English medical and herbal glossary, from before 1400 — broadly the same period. (The OED's full entry sits behind a subscription gate; the dating above is drawn from its published, publicly indexed summary and cross-checked against Etymonline's independent research.)

That the word shows up first in a medical glossary, rather than a cookbook, is a small but telling detail — it suggests pancakes were common enough by 1400 to be used as a reference point for describing something else entirely, not a food that needed introducing.

The first written recipes

Le Ménagier de Paris — a household guide written around 1393 by an older Parisian husband for his young wife, covering everything from morality to menus — includes a recipe for “crespes”: flour, whole eggs (yolks and whites), water, salt, and wine, fried thin in lard. It's one of the earliest known written pancake recipes anywhere, and notably closer to a modern crêpe than to a thick griddle cake.

In English, the manuscript collection Harleian MS 279 (British Library, c.1430), edited and published by the Early English Text Society in 1888, contains an instruction to “makyst a pancake” — pouring batter into a pan over the fire and spreading it out. It's among the earliest English-language pancake instructions on record.

A word of caution, in the spirit of getting this right: pancake recipes are sometimes also claimed for two other well-known medieval texts, the French Le Viandier (attributed to Taillevent) and the English Liber Cure Cocorum (c.1430). Neither claim could be confirmed against publicly available transcriptions during research for this article — Liber Cure Cocorum's surviving text appears to contain fritters and an egg “tansy” dish, but no clearly identifiable pancake recipe. Treat those two specific attributions as unverified rather than repeating them as fact.

Gervase Markham and “The Best Pancake” (1615)

By the early 17th century, English pancake recipes are detailed and recognisable. Gervase Markham's household manual The English Huswife (1615) gives a recipe titled “The Best Pancake”: eggs beaten with “fair running water,” spiced with cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg, mixed into wheat flour with a little salt, fried as thin as possible in sweet butter, and served with sugar. Swap out the spices and it is, in essence, the recipe still used across Britain on Shrove Tuesday.

There's a nice piece of social evidence from the same period, too. The English noblewoman Lady Anne Clifford recorded in her diary on 8 February 1619: “that day I made pancakes with my women in the great Chamber” — direct documentary proof of pancake-making as a shared domestic, social occasion among Englishwomen four centuries ago.

Shakespeare and the word “flapjack”

Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre (written c.1607–08, printed 1609) contains one of the most quoted early appearances of the word: the First Fisherman offers “puddings and flap-jacks, and thou'rt welcome.” It's a genuinely famous citation — but it isn't the word's origin. Etymonline dates “flapjack” itself to before 1600, formed from “flap” and “jack,” describing the flipping motion. Shakespeare popularised the word in print; he didn't coin it.

The Brittany buckwheat myth

The galette bretonne — Brittany's savoury buckwheat pancake — has a popular origin story: that buckwheat was brought back to France by Crusaders returning from the Holy Land in the 12th or 13th century. It's a good story. It also doesn't survive scrutiny.

A 2017 doctoral thesis by the French historian Alain-Gilles Chaussat (Université de Caen) examined the documentary record directly and found that every written mention of buckwheat in France post-dates 1450 — more than 150 years after the last Crusade — and that buckwheat was, in any case, unknown in the Levant and North Africa, the regions Crusaders returned from. The “Crusader” theory has no documentary support.

What the evidence does support is messier and more interesting: some archaeobotanical (pollen) evidence points to buckwheat present in Brittany as far back as the Iron Age, while tax and land records suggest large-scale open-field cultivation began in the late 13th or early 14th century. Cultivation then expanded significantly across Brittany in the 15th and 16th centuries, under the rule of Duchess Anne of Brittany. The honest version of this story is: buckwheat farming in Brittany has a long and genuinely uncertain history, and the tidy Crusader legend is a later invention layered on top of it.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Sources & further reading

• Etymonline — "pancake"
• Etymonline — "flapjack"
• Oxford English Dictionary — "pancake, n."
• Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books (ed. Thomas Austin, EETS, 1888) — full text, Harleian MS 279
• Smithsonian Magazine — "A Brief History of Pancakes" (Grace Linden)
• Martha Carlin (UW-Milwaukee) — "Medieval Culinary Texts (500–1500)"
• William Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Act 2 Scene 1 — MIT full text
• Alain-Gilles Chaussat, doctoral thesis on Breton buckwheat cultivation, Université de Caen (2017)
• The English Huswife, Gervase Markham (1615) — digitised 1623 edition, Internet Archive
• Wikipedia — Lady Anne Clifford