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Comment by mmcgaha | Hacker News Reader

Looks more like a crepe than a pancake.

This is a dialects of English thing.

In Britain: pancakes don't use baking powder. They're flat like a slighly thicker crepe.

I would describe a thick fluffy pancake made with baking powder as a "Scotch pancake", but in Australia, the USA, Canada and New Zealand, that style is just a "pancake".

I'm sympathetic to the confusion, despite having a British origin myself, just because the thick-fluffy pancake is objectively more similar to other things we call "cake".

This sort of thing has gone to court - the biscuit versus cake saga of Jaffa Cakes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes

Wait until you hear about flapjacks.

And johnnycakes!

Pancakes in nz are not thick. You get pancakes which are like crepes, or pikelets which are like small American pancakes.

American pancakes are disgusting. It’s like the equivalent of American carbon bacon.

More pancakes and bacon for us, I guess. Don't know why you felt it necessary to make that unwarranted attack, though.

Hmm. Maybe it’s regional? I spent years of my life finding all the best pancakes and French Toast of Auckland cafes and they all (at least aspired) to be thick and fluffy- unless they were intentionally crepes which are also very common.

The outlier I remember being when McDonalds started doing breakfast and they offered pancakes - I think I got them once when I had a super early flight at the airport and they were almost inedible- thin and rubbery! Easily the worst pancakes I’ve had in my life.

I never liked McDonald’s… hotcakes? I don’t recall them calling them pancakes. I believe they called them hotcakes. But yes rubber!

But I didn’t know what a thick American pancakes was until I moved to Australia mid 2000s. In NZ if I got them in a cafe they were like max 5-6mm in height. But always soft and fluffy.

But when I got to Australia and had American style they were always very thick. And it clogs the mouth. I don’t know how to explain it, but it requires me to have a drink while I eat them because there’s so much… cake… every Kiwi I knew in Australia also hated them.

Apologies, thanks for the correction.

John Locke was British, and in England we generally call crepe's pancakes (or at least, they are much more similar to a crepe, for instance on pancake day/shrove tuesday we will eat a thin pancake rather than an american-style pancake).

What American's call a pancake would be an 'American pancake' over here.

That would essentially be the difference, yes.

Crepes are mostly the same general idea as pancakes without raising agents; this recipe doesn't contain baking powder because it hadn't been invented yet.

Food evolution is quite interesting. Most recipes we consider traditional standardized maybe 50-100 years ago. A pretty good example of how far a recipe can evolve is how mincemeat pies evolved from containing mostly meat, some fruit, and spices in the 11th century, to the modern incarnation which has no meat and is just fruit and spices.

Bear in mind that you're reading a recipe written by John Locke, an English philosopher. So he's using the English definition of "pancake", which is nothing like the American definition.

He wrote it before 01694. Most of the English settlers who would define the American dialect of English hadn't moved to America yet in 01694, so there is no particular reason to expect Locke's definition to be more similar to the modern English definition than to the modern American definition. (And Nicosia claims that the result was in fact in between, even though she didn't beat it for the full 15 minutes.)

Curious: Why do you write it 01694 and not 1694?

> nutmeg is toxic to humans in surprisingly small amounts. I wouldn't eat half a nutmeg by myself in one sitting!

It seems to be an affectation encouraged by the Long Now Foundation: https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-di...

I can kind of understand it if you develop a database schema. But I don't see the point for regular text. No constraints exist, you can write whatever numbers you want.

Long now philosophy is that writing years that way encourages you to think about history on a different scale. To consider the date now as being near the beginning of a long future of history, rather than as at the end of a long line of history. Or, when looking at a historical date like 01694 to realize it’s not so very far from 02022.

This particular affectation seems really far from overcoming its current limitation of being a readability roadblock.

I didn't find it particularly bad for readability. Then again, I'm used to ISO dates (2022-01-30).

It's the leading zero that throws me off and makes me look for a day-of-month or month number in a string that is too short to have one and a leading zero. ISO 8601 dates are fine.

ISO 8601 dates are perfect! It's too bad they're not more popular.

I tried to push for them in labels used in a manufacturing plant with locations both in the U.S. and Ireland. Seems like a slam dunk because it eliminates the confusion about whether the month or day comes first. In the end I had to compromise on the month specified by abbreviation rather than number: 2022-Jan-30.

And, it made me wonder if it was an octal representation of something.

Being HN my guess is avoiding the Y10K error. You're either part of the solution or part of the problem.

Probably too much nutmeg in my diet.

(No, it's a silly Long Now thing.)

They remind me of “Swedish Pancakes” which are kind of in-between an American pancake and a crepe.

No idea if they are actually Swedish but you can buy Lund’s Swedish pancake mix in the US and you get something similar

I'm Swedish, and I can confirm that all my Swedish cookbooks contain recipes for "pancakes", "crepes" and "American pancakes", which are definitely 3 different things, and a Swedish "pancake" is a lot like you describe it.

I also have a recipe for what my cookbook calls Danish pancakes, or "æbleskiver" in Danish. Those are more like small round doughnuts prepared in a special frying pan. I'm not sure if the Danish would consider those "pancakes" though.

To further complicate the pancake taxonomy there is also the curiosity of “plättar”. Very small pancakes made in a special frying pan for more festive occasions. Not sure about their origin, but they are very common in Småland in the south of Sweden.

https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plättar#/media/Fil%3APlattla...

Plättar sounds a bit like Norwegian lapper. E.g.:

https://www.tine.no/oppskrifter/kaker/vafler-og-smakaker/sve...

But my favourite variant is rislapper, where the starting point is cold rice porridge:

https://www.tine.no/oppskrifter/kaker/vafler-og-smakaker/ris...

As a child we'd often have rice porridge one day, and if there were leftovers we'd have rislapper a day or two later.

You can make it in a regular pan, as the mix is thick enough it'll stay together, so just make them small.

(I strongly object, however, to the use of sour cream, jam and pistachio's to serve with them, and wonder what they'd been smoking - I prefer butter and a sprinkling of sugar)

Two more types of small pancakes are poffertjes (Dutch), which sound a lot like your Swedish plättar, and pikelets (English).

Swedish cookery geek who loves visiting the Netherlands: poffertjes have depth, the pan has deep round-bottomed indents to hold batter. Swedish plättar are also made in a special pan (typically cast iron and from someone's granny) but the indents are circular and low, just maybe 3 mm deep. Lucky this is right after breakfast or I would be hungry now.

I don't know how they were made tradionally, but today as you say æbleskiver (apple disks) are not flat, they are spherical. That is why you need the special pan. Also, today most people don't put apple pieces inside them, instead eat them with some kind of jam, strawberry or raspberry.

Pancake seems to be reserved for flat things, so yeah æbleskiver would not be considered pancakes.

I have an æbleskiver cast iron pan. Only used it a couple of times, seems like a lot of trouble for what you get.

My version of them are as follows, from start to finished meal in 15 minutes with two good crepe pans.

This is per person, so for two people you double it, except for the extra egg.

1 egg (plus one extra)

2 decilitre (dl) of milk, roughly two cups

1 dl of flower

1 pinch of salt

1 tablespoon of sugar

1/2 dl of olive oil

Lots of butter to fry in

Mix eggs and half the milk. Add the flower, salt and sugar and mix until it is a smooth batter. Add the remaining milk and oil. Mix until smooth. Fry in butter, about a teaspoon, on a hot pan (7/10) until dry on top, flip over, for 30 sec. Done.

Serve with sweet jam, whipped cream, or butter and sugar, icecream. Go to town, enjoy.

I think they are more similar to a crepe than an american pancake. They contain no rising agent, but a crepe is thinner.

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