Illustration by Nicole Newsom, Times Staff.

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The easy French recipe of Crêpes

A Crêpe is a thin pancake coming from a northwest region of France named Brittany. The people living there, the Bretons, eat Crêpes almost every day.

But there is a particular day in France when all the French people eat Crêpes: La Chandeleur, Feb. 2.

La Chandeleur has been celebrated for so long that nobody can really say where it comes from: for some people, it is a Christian tradition, for others it’s much older, coming from a pagan tradition to celebrate the end of winter.

People think if you cook crêpes with a gold coin in your left hand, you’ll become wealthy.

There are two sorts of Crêpes:

The Galettes, made with buckwheat flour, are stuffed with salty ingredients and French people eat them as an entree. The typical one is The Complete with eggs, ham and cheese.

The Crêpes, made with all-purpose wheat flour. People usually eat them as a sweet dessert. They should be extremely thin and your goal is to eat as many as you can. To stuff them, the classic salty butter and sugar are recommended, but the milk caramel or the chocolate ones will definitely seduce you.

And the recipe is so simple that in France, every single kid learns how to do crêpes during a cooking session in his first grade.

TOOLS:

A big bowl

An egg whisk or a fork

A thin pan

A ladle

A spatula

INGREDIENTS FOR 3-4 PEOPLE:

3 eggs

1 3/4 cup of flour

2 cups of milk

1 tsp of salt

1 tsp of oil

1 paper towel

RECIPE:

Mix all the ingredients in the bowl with the fork.

Rest batter for one hour in the fridge (skip the rest if you are very hungry).

Warm up the pan, pour the oil and wipe it with the paper towel: you will use that paper towel again to wipe the pan before the next crêpe, without pouring oil again in the pan.

When the pan is warm enough, lower the heat and pour a ladle of batter. Quickly, spread out the batter on the pan.

Wait 1 minute and start to unstick the crepe with the spatula. Wait 30 seconds and turn the crepe on the stove.

Wait another minute and it’s ready!

Do it again until the end of the batter.