Crepe

A very thin pancake of French origin made with eggs and flour which is poured sparingly into a frying pan and fried on both sides.

Just as the English language uses the apostrophe to indicate missing letters in words such as can’t or o’clock (shortened forms of cannot and of the clock), the French language uses a mark called the circumflex to indicate that the word once possessed a now-absent s. Thus, French words such as hotel, crouton, and crepe were formerly spelt, in Old French, hostel, crouston, and crespe; not surprisingly, the letter s is also found in the same position in the Latin words from which these three French words derive: hospes (meaning stranger), crusta (meaning hard shell), and crispus (meaning curled). In Old French, crespe possessed the curled sense of its Latin ancestor, and therefore it—or rather its later form, crepe—became, in the seventeenth century, the name of a curled and crinkled fabric. In the eighteenth century, the British adopted this form of the word—crepe—as a name for curled and crinkled fabric or paper, but they also invented a more “English” spelling, crape, and gave this name to crinkled, black strips of cloth draped over coffins or worn around the arm as a sign of mourning. A hundred years later, in the late nineteenth century, crepe finally acquired its culinary sense, thanks to the invention of the crepe Suzette, a thin pancake with curled edges, served in a liqueur sauce and named by a Parisian chef after the actress Suzanne Reichenberg.