Holy crêpe

Today is Shrove Tuesday, otherwise known as Pancake Day from the tradition of eating pancakes to use up the remaining eggs before the beginning of Lent. A perfect time to look at the word "crêpe". Both "crêpe" and "crisp" come from the same Latin word, crispus. But before you leap to the conclusion that this is because crêpes are crispy around the edges, I have to tell you that it is a lot more convoluted (and interesting!) than that.

Back in Latin, crispus meant "curly-haired". Surprisingly, this word was borrowed into English very early, back in Anglo-Saxon times when English did not borrow heavily from Latin except for church terms. Intriguing. Why did the Anglo-Saxons need to borrow this word? Perhaps Anglo-Saxon hair didn't have the curly gene whereas Italian hair did? Whatever the reason, the word had been borrowed before 900, when Bede described someone as having "crisp locks".

Meanwhile, the French had also inherited crispus  from Latin but turned it into cresp. They also used it of hair, but also of other wavy things, and by 1285 they were using it of thin pancakes, not because they were crispy around the edges but because they were wrinkly around the edges (crêpe has never had in French the "crunchy" sense that "crisp" has in English). The French carried on eating cresps -- which became crêpe when the the s fell out of the word (memorialized only by that circumflex) -- while the more literally-minded English ate the culinarily identical "pancakes" for several centuries.

Auguste Escoffier of the Savoy Hotel, late Victorian and Edwardian England's version of a celebrity chef,  introduced the English to crêpes Suzette. 
No doubt Mrs Patmore would have served them to the Crawleys at the Downton Abbey dinner table. Drenched in a boozy orange sauce, these were the only crêpes the English knew about until the crêpe craze of the 1970s made crêpes ubiquitous as an all purpose wrapping for all kinds of fillings.