Crêpes with butter, sugar and cinnamon
The year after my brother’s death Ben and I spent nine months backpacking overseas, mostly around Europe. At the time I didn’t think about the impact this might have on my grieving parents and younger brother (who, by the way, were nothing but encouraging of my plans to desert them). I was living on a diet of denial and distraction, you see, and after forcing myself to finish my final year of clinical placement (much of which took place in the hospital where David had died just a few months prior) I wanted to escape. I wanted to see the world and live my life because I now knew that growing old was a privilege.
And so we left.
When my graduation ceremony was happening Ben and I were in Hong Kong eating claypot rice. We then travelled to Scotland, where we ate deep fried haggis, and England, where we ate chicken tikka masala. At the markets in France we watched chickens cooking on a rotisserie, a tray of potatoes positioned underneath to catch the drippings. We ate it all. Spaghetti alle vongole in Italy, gyros with chips in Greece, fermented fish and rye bread with jam in Russia, tredelník in Prague, blackberry yoghurt and cheese in Switzerland, lamb and sellou in Morocco, black rice with squid in Spain and dried figs in Croatia, which were so good and plump I ate them by the bagful. We ended our trip in Thailand at Baan Dada, where we ate rice and vegetables for breakfast, lunch and dinner. A plate of sliced cucumber would accompany most meals, along with little bowls of soy sauce and diced chilli for dipping. Some evenings Ben and I would catch a ride in to Sangkhlaburi and eat pad krapow at the outdoor market, as well as crêpes cooked in a wok that were filled with sweetened condensed milk and a fried egg.
We did other things on our trip besides eating, of course (though not too many things, as our budget was exceedingly tight), but it’s the food I remember most. During our time away I kept a journal and in it are pages and pages of notes describing everything we saw and everything we ate. When we got home I turned those notes into a scrapbok-style cookbook. Searching the internet for pastilla recipes was an excellent distraction from my reality; I was home and David wasn’t there.
One of the recipes I included in the book was for crêpes with butter, sugar and cinnamon. Paris was one of the more expensive cities we visited, and most of our daily budget went towards accommodation. However we still managed to eat well - little pots of yoghurt for breakfast, baguette for lunch and, more often than not, crêpes for dinner. A few doors down from our hostel was a little crêperie that had a happy hour special - two crêpes and a beer for 5 Euros. We’d start with a savoury crepe (either ham and cheese or egg and cheese, sometimes ratatouille) and then we’d have a sweet one. There were a number of sweet options available - jam, Nutella and chestnut puree, to name a few - but I couldn’t look past menu item number two, which read beurre, sucre et cannelle (butter, sugar and cinnamon). Every time we visited I would order the same thing. And then for some reason, after pasting the recipe in the pages of my cookbook, I forgot about it. Until one morning a few weeks ago, when I was standing by the stove waiting for the last of the crêpe batter to cook.
Lemon and sugar is a hard filling to beat, it’s what I crave when I want to taste something bright with my crêpes, which is often. Butter, sugar and cinnamon is different. It’s for the days when you want something rich and warm, something reminiscent of cinnamon buns. As I stood at the stove I wondered whether Ben would remember my persistent preference, some eleven years later. I was sure Joan would love it. “Ben!”, I called out. No response came. I could hear him in the next room with Walt, whose primary job at the moment is pushing limits. Grabbing the salted butter from the fridge, I resolved to surprise him when it was time to eat. I cut off a good slab and swirled it in a pan. Once the butter had bubbled down and started to brown I poured it in to a jug and placed it on the dining table, alongside a little cup of sugar and a jar of ground cinnamon.
”Breakfast is ready!” I called out - this time louder. As Ben helped Walt in to his seat I asked if he knew where my cookbook was - the one I made after our big trip. He did, and quickly grabbed it while I tied Joan’s hair back. ”Do you remember that little crêperie we ate at almost every night while we were in Paris?”, I asked as he brought the book to the table.
Crêpes with butter, sugar and cinnamon
Notes:
My two favourite crêpe recipes are Clotilde’s French crêpes and Green Kitchen Stories’ spinach crêpes (scroll down for the recipe). If I’m making Clotilde’s recipe I generally omit the sugar and rum (though it’s excellent with rum). For both recipes my flour of choice tends to be spelt - either white or wholemeal, depending on what I have in my pantry. And I use ghee or butter in the pan.
There isn’t a strict recipe for the filling of these crêpes. All you need to do is warm some butter in a pan (I like to brown the butter), drizzle as much as you’d like over your crêpe and follow suit with as much sugar and cinnamon as you please.
I like to start with a savoury crêpe before moving on to sweet. My current favourite savoury crêpe combination is spinach leaves + scrambled eggs + sauerkraut. Ben does the same but adds grated cheese to his.
I cook my crêpes in pans designed specifically to cook crêpes (which we found in a tiny shop in Turkey on our honeymoon and were so tremendously excited we bought two, happily lugging them around the remainder of our trip). You don’t need crêpe-specific pans - a good, well-seasoned skillet will do. But I do find crêpes are easier to flip when using a crêpe pan, perhaps because the sides are nice and low.
