The soufflé pancake is one of the longest-lived bakery items, with its roots in the humble pancake. Let's look at the history behind the soufflé pancake.
The pancake everyone's talking about right now comes from Japan: the soufflé pancake. It's beautifully neat and perfectly round, thick, light and fluffy without being dense. Some shops even fill it with a sweet cream as light as air. No wonder people queue in long lines to eat these pancakes.
This may be the latest stage in the pancake's evolution. Egg whites are whipped into a fluffy meringue, then folded into a batter of flour, egg yolks, milk, sugar and baking powder (plus any flavourings you like), creating pancakes lighter and fluffier than ever before.
An Ancient Food
Pancakes aren't new, and they're not just a few hundred years old either. Food historians tell us that pancakes date back at least 30,000 years.
Stone Age people are said to have cooked by grinding cattail (in Thai, kok thup ruesi) and ferns with water, then frying the mixture on stones or stone pans that were probably greased with oil. The result was a fried flatbread ("hardtack") resembling a pancake or crêpe (and, of course, similar to the same type of food under dozens of other names, such as flapjack, hoe cake, hot cake and drop scone). Overall, it was a flat cake made by mixing flour with liquid into a thick batter and frying it.
That's what scientists believe, but the oldest evidence of pancakes found in a human stomach dates back at least 5,300 years.
The Pancake Wars: Europe vs America
Today we may be most familiar with American pancakes, but as we know, the United States was born long after Europe, and because pancakes are such an ancient food, Europeans were certainly making pancakes before Americans. They just didn't call them pancakes.
The longest-running pancake war in food history is the one between American pancakes and European pancakes, which many people call crêpes.
The European pancake, or crêpe, is defined by being thin and flat, because it's an old-style pancake made without baking powder or any other raising agent.
In Europe, pancakes have spread into many families. Dutch pancakes are called pannenkoeken, Austrian pancakes are called Palatschinken, and another family of thin, crêpe-like pancakes many people may know comes from Eastern Europe: blini or blintz, also an ancient pancake family. All of these share similar basic recipes with different details. For example, French crêpe batter may need to rest for several hours, while palačinke batter is cooked straight away.
The dividing line between European and American pancakes is the use of raising agents such as baking soda or baking powder. American pancakes are therefore usually thicker than European ones, and go by many names, such as hotcake, flapjack or griddle cake. European pancakes may be served rolled and filled (as crêpes) or decorated with toppings and sides, while American pancakes are served stacked several high, which has become the iconic image of the American pancake. Throughout history people have argued (needlessly) over which kind is better.
The Flatness of Pancakes
One defining trait of pancakes that Westerners agree on is flatness. Whether it's an American pancake, blini, griddle cake, crêpe or anything else in the pancake family, they all share one feature: they're flat.
However, looking at the arrival of the fluffy Japanese pancake, we can say that the Japanese soufflé pancake isn't flat at all. It rises tall like a mountain rather than lying flat like a plain.
So the Japanese soufflé pancake isn't only new in appearance; it also helps redefine how we see pancakes, a view long dominated by Western eyes.
We could say that the pancake, with roots reaching back to the Neolithic era, a place in Christian tradition and a long battle for deliciousness between Europe and America, now has a new challenger from the East, Japan's soufflé pancake, helping to redefine what a pancake is.
The current battle for the pancake crown shows that food history never ends. It will keep evolving as long as humans eat, and the more the world's cultures mingle, the more fascinating the competition between food cultures becomes.
