Classroom lesson · Food · 🇫🇷 France

Crêpes

The world's thinnest pancake, with a region all to itself

A tall stack of thin golden crêpes

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

A crêpe (say it 'krep') is a very thin pancake. They are made by pouring a runny batter onto a hot flat pan, then spreading it out as wide as a dinner plate. In France, you can fill a crêpe with almost anything - chocolate, jam, lemon and sugar, cheese, ham, eggs or fruit.

Tell me more

Crêpes come from a part of France called Brittany, in the north-west, where it sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean. Brittany has its own language, its own flag and its own kind of food. Crêpes are the most famous thing on the menu.

There are two kinds. Sweet crêpes are made from wheat flour and are pale gold. Savoury crêpes - called galettes - are made from buckwheat flour and are darker and a little nutty. A traditional Brittany lunch is a galette with cheese, ham and a fried egg in the middle, folded into a neat square.

Making a crêpe takes some skill. The batter has to spread thin without breaking. Some Brittany restaurants have crêpe-makers who can spin a wooden tool called a rozell to push the batter out paper-thin in seconds. The best ones can make hundreds in an hour.

There is a French holiday in February called La Chandeleur where everyone makes crêpes at home. There is even a tradition of flipping the crêpe with one hand while holding a coin in the other - it is said to bring good luck for the year. Lots of crêpes end up on the floor.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01What is your family's favourite kind of pancake? They exist all over the world - American pancakes, Indian dosa, Russian blini, Ethiopian injera. Why do you think pancakes are so popular?
  2. 02A crêpe can be sweet or savoury. What's a food in your country that can flip between sweet and savoury?
  3. 03What would your dream crêpe filling be?
Try this

Classroom activity

Each pupil designs their own crêpe on paper - drawing a circle and filling it with their favourite ingredients. Give it a name. Display them as a class 'crêpe menu' on the wall. Vote for the most delicious-looking and the most surprising.

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