breakfast combinations

Today's question was submitted by Anne. Yesterday morning, we were having Batter Blaster pancakes for breakfast.

As she poured the syrup on her pancakes, she said "I wonder who thought of taking the stuff that comes out of trees and putting it on your food." And thus, the question was born.


Question: Who came up with the idea of putting maple syrup on pancakes?

Answer: This one was a challenge for Google. Sometimes, it's all about the way in which you phrase the question, but nothing seemed to produce an answer. I did, however, learn a lot about the histories of both pancakes and maple syrup.

Pancakes

The modern pancake has roots dating to ancient times. Foods similar to pancakes can be dated back to the ancient Romans. The Romans enjoyed a simple flatbread consisting of flour, milk, eggs and spices which was called called "Alita Dolcia" (Latin for "another sweet"). Some Alita Dolcia were sweetened with honey or fruits hile others were savory breads filled with meats and cheeses. Although Alita Dolcia may have resembled pancakes, the pancakes we know today originated in Medieval Europe.

From it's inception, America has relied on the pancake as an important source of nourishment.

Pancakes have long been a staple of the American breakfast table, and their history is as old as that of the Native Americans who shaped a soft batter in their hands and called it, in the Narragansett, nokehick (it is soft), transmuted by early white settlers into "no cake."

Maple Syrup

It is not known for sure who first discovered the technique of collecting sap and cooking it into maple syrup, but when the first Europeans arrived in North America and had contact with the Native American tribes of the eastern woodlands, they report stories about the consumption of maple sap in Indian lore. Here is a quote from a British Royal Society paper written in 1685: "The Savages of Canada, in the time that the sap rises, in the Maple, make an incision in the Tree, by which it runs out; and after they have evaporated eight pounds of the liquor, there remains one pound as sweet ...." A publication in 1912 by the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers' Association credits both Native Americans and French Canadians with "passing on the secrets of sugarmaking." Maple syrup and maple sugar became the household sweetener in the Canadian and American colonies throughout the nineteenth century, instead of refined white cane sugar, raw sugar, or molasses. Maple trees were readily available and a supply of syrup and sugar cakes could be made for the year ahead.