Unwrapping my Le Creuset crêpe pan from its shrink-wrap, I was assisted by a hole in the plastic. The reason for this hole was because the T-shaped spreading utensil had been removed. Mrs H recalled that the same applied to all the crêpe pans on sale in York. Le Creuset sup plied a wooden spatula with the pan, but the company apparently thought that inclusion of a T-shaped utensil would prompt mystified inquiries from UK customers. That it should have been included was evident from the instruction booklet. This directed purchasers: ‘Use the râteau in a circular motion to spread out the batter.’ Aha! So the T-shaped utensil was a râteau (a word omitted from my big Oxford-Hachette French/English dictionary). At this point, I should have badgered Le Creuset for a râteau, but I thought it would be easy enough to find one in London. This turned out to be a misapprehension. The nearest I got was a shrugging excuse: ‘We had some once…’ Eventually, on a day-trip to Calais, I bought a râteau à crêpe at the Carrefour hypermarché for one euro.
At last I was able to use the griddle. Under Mrs H’s direction, I proved the pan by slowly heating it, pouring a small puddle of sunflower oil in the centre and wiping round with a kitchen towel until only a sheen remained. ‘It seals the pan a bit like a non-stick surface,’ explained Mrs H. ‘You need to do this if you haven’t used the pan for a while. And NEVER wash it up.’ Having made my batter an hour or so earlier, I was now ready to tackle my first crêpe. After heating the griddle to the right temperature (water dripped on the pan should evaporate immediately), I was faced with the task of lubrication for crêpe purposes. Here, the booklet indicated another difference in the treatment of French and English customers. In the English text, we are told to ‘lightly oil the surface of the pan between each crêpe (half an apple placed on the end of a fork and dipped in the oil is a good way of doing this)’ but French readers were told to utilise ‘une demi-pomme de terre piquée au bout d’une fourchette’. A spud seemed to have the greater authenticity for this peasant dish.
After smearing a light coating of sunflower oil on to the griddle with my half-potato-on-a-fork, I poured in a small amount of batter and plied the râteau like the bloke in the market. Instant disaster. The mix started cooking and proved impossible to spread. My attempt to use the râteau ‘in a circular motion’ only shifted a tiny bit of the mix. When the first side seemed to be done, I edged the wooden spatula under and flipped it over. The result was a crepe of a disturbingly alien shape, burnt in some areas, undercooked in the middle. ‘The first one is always rotten,’ sympathised Mrs H. ‘You don’t know how much mixture to put in.’ The second crêpe was equally bad, while my third one looked like a highly inept English pancake. So much for pancakes being ‘completely predictable’.
The Le Creuset booklet suggested that expertise did not come immediately with crêpes: ‘Once you have mastered the traditional crêpe recipe, you can experiment with different ingredients’. Kate Whiteman’s cookbook Brittany Gastronomique is more explicit about the tricky craft of the crêpe: ‘[The batter] is spread outwards in a circular motion using a wood rake. This requires a flexible wrist and a light hand and is definitely not as easy as it looks.’ Lacking both flexibility of wrist and lightness of hand, it would obviously take me years of daily crêpe-making to wield the râteau with the proficiency of the market man. Mrs H pointed out another deficiency in my approach. ‘Your batter needs to be a lot thinner,’ said Mrs H. ‘It’s too floury at present, so your crêpes are too thick.’
Thinning it down helped with the spreading, but the resulting crêpe was too thin, more like a crisp than a pancake. Though thinness is of the essence with crêpes, I realised that I was not putting enough batter in. Obviously, the lip on the griddle was intended to contain the batter. I also discovered that a paper towel dipped in sunflower oil was better for lightly oiling the pan than any vegetable on a fork. When I finally managed to make an acceptable crêpe with my seventh batch, I felt battered but triumphant. Though it would never be mistaken for a professional rendition, it was pretty much circular and, better still, pretty much edible.
There are no end of crêpe possibilities, both sweet and savoury, but I stuck to the topping I’d enjoyed in the market: Grand Marnier, but more of it. My generously doused version won an ovation from Mrs H. We also tried a smear of Nutella as advocated in Nigella Lawson’s Nigella Express. This was acceptable in a highly sweet, nutty sort of way, but prodigiously high in calories. Check the ingredients of Nutella and you’ll find that it contains a large percentage of vegetable oil. Nigella’s suggested accompaniment of whipped cream infused with Fra Angelico (a hazelnut liqueur) does little to reduce the calorific content.
There is one significant exception to my keep-it-simple rule for crêpes. This is the late nineteenth or early twentieth century invention known as crêpes Suzette. It is one of the few instances that a member of the pancake family soars in social esteem (blinis with caviar is another). According to Larousse Gastronomique, Henri Charpentier, a French cook working for John D. Rockefeller in the US, claimed to have invented the dish in the Café de Paris, Monte Carlo, in 1896 ‘as a compliment to the Prince of Wales and his companion, whose first name was Suzette’. In his autobiography, the chef said that the Prince gave him ‘a jewelled ring, a Panama hat and a cane’ for his creation. ‘One taste,’ Charpentier insisted, ‘would reform a cannibal into a civilised gentleman.’
While Suzette sounds the right sort of name for a ‘companion’ of the Prince of Wales in Monte Carlo, Larousse says the story is baloney. ‘In actual fact, at that date Charpentier was not old enough to be the head waiter serving the prince.’ (He would have been sixteen.) John Ayto’s A-Z of Food and Drink puts us right. The first reference to crêpes Suzette in print was by Escoffier in 1907. His ‘Suzette pancakes’ was an unflamed dish, as it remains in the recipe offered by Larousse. The encyclopedia notes a bit sniffily that Charpentier ‘introduced the fashion for flamed crêpes Suzette to America’.
Though the pancake-loving Suzette remains a mystery, the dedication was no small honour. The tangy orange sauce marries happily with the blandness of the crêpes and, at least, in the Anglo-Saxon version, the flaming brandy provides a dramatic dénouement to a meal. You don’t often see the billowing alcoholic explosion from restaurant dessert trolleys these days, but my version of crêpes Suzette – which tested my newfound prowess as a crêpe-maker twelve times over – went down a storm when I did it for some friends. You make the crêpes in advance, roll them up like English pancakes and warm them in the oven before performing the coup de théâtre with the flaming brandy. ‘Oooh, it’s lovely,’ said Mrs H. ‘Can we start having it instead of pancakes on Pancake Day?’ I preened like the dubious Charpentier.
For a savoury pancake, I prefer a galette, which is made from buckwheat flour. Its flavour is so assertive that many books, including Larousse, suggest a half-and-half mix with wheat flour. The darkness of the flour explains the French name sarrasin (Saracen). Over 12,000 tons per year are imported into Brittany for galettes. The batter is pale grey (it looks a bit like mushroom soup) and smells rather nutty. Recipes used to be egg-free, but most modern versions are less austere. Spurning tradition, the galette recipe in Larousse includes ‘5–6 beaten eggs’, but I based my recipe on the one in Brittany Gastronomique, which requires a single egg for 250g of flour. The ancient Breton mixing technique is described: ‘You should beat the batter energetically for at less 15 minutes, slapping it from side to side of the mixing bowl.’ I used a hand-held electric whisk for five minutes, which felt quite long enough. The resulting galette was striking in appearance, like a map of dark-brown islands on a light brown sea, edged with lacy filigree. The folding of the galette is different from the crêpe. First, you put a dollop of the savoury filling – two favourites