ENCORE: The History Of Pancakes

And with all that said, of course, to better understand and appreciate our food, we have to know where it came from.

If I were to ask, what's the oldest prepared food in human history, bread might be a common guess, maybe soup.

Some people might say roasted meat.

But if we're talking about foods that resemble a recipe, a deliberate combination of ground grains, liquid and heat, one of the strongest contenders might actually be pancakes.

Yeah.

Pancakes, a short stack sitting under a puddle of maple syrup, might have deeper historical roots than almost any other breakfast food on Earth.

And the reason is surprisingly simple.

Pancakes require almost no technology.

You don't need an oven.

You don't need complicated tools.

And all you really need is some sort of ground grain, a liquid to turn it into batter, and a hot surface.

That surface could be a bronze pan, a clay griddle, or thousands of years ago, a heated stone near a fire, which means pancakes didn't emerge in just one place.

They emerged everywhere throughout human history across different continents.

And today we're going to follow that story starting before written history and ending somewhere between a box mix in your pantry and a diner counter.

We need to go back long before cookbooks, restaurants, or brunch.

It begins with early agriculture.

Around 10,000 years ago, humans in parts of the Middle East began domesticating grains like wheat and barley.

Grinding stones appear in archaeological sites from the Neolithic period, showing that people were already processing grains into flour-like meals.

Once you have ground up grain, the next logical step is cooking it.

One of the most fascinating pieces of evidence comes from a famous archaeological discovery, Utsi the Iceman, the naturally preserved mummy found in the Alps in 1991.

Ötzi lived around 3300 BCE, during the Copper Age.

When scientists analyzed the contents in his stomach, they found evidence that he had eaten ground einkor wheat and charcoal particles, suggesting that some form of grain preparation had been cooked over fire shortly before his death.

Now, we can't say definitively that Utsi sat down and enjoyed a stack of pancakes before his unfortunate alpine misadventure, but archaeologists do believe that prehistoric communities likely cooked simple grain batters on hot stones, producing foods similar to flatbreads or griddle cakes.

In other words, pancake-like foods may be among the earliest cooked grain dishes humans ever made.

Erica, our pancakes that our friend from over 5,000 years ago, I'm sure they're very different from today's.