Shrove Tuesday is coming up this week, which means that, in some shape or form, pancakes are going to be beaten, fried, tossed, dropped, raced and eaten across the country in much the same way they have been for the past 500 years.

Should you feel the need to vary your pancake diet from the usual lemony, sugary concoctions, you could try a recipe from elsewhere in the world. Pancakes, it seems, predate bread as one of man’s oldest forms of cooked food. The Russians, for example, specialise in yeast-risen, buckwheat blinis (drop scones), which taste as good eaten with honey for tea as they do with their traditional accompaniment of smoked salmon. The Italians, meanwhile, use an egg-free chickpea batter that tastes closer to an Indian pancake than a European crêpe. I am using it to make Red onion and rosemary farinate. Having said that, there is nothing like a delicious sweet pancake to raise your spirits, so I have included a couple that fit that bill, Lacy crepes with rose-water butter and Cinnamon pancakes with praline cream and chocolate sauce.

Ingredients

Blinis are traditionally cooked in clarified butter and served with caviar or smoked salmon. To make clarified butter, slowly melt some ordinary butter in a pan and allow it to boil for a minute, then set aside to cool for 10 minutes. Pour off the molten yellow butter through muslin to remove the white froth. Discard the milky liquid that’s left.

Serves 4

For the blinis
70g plain flour
40g buckwheat flour
½ tsp fast-action dried yeast
Pinch of salt
115ml milk
1 large egg, separated
1 tbsp sour cream
1 tbsp melted butter
Sunflower oil or clarified butter, for cooking

To serve
Sour cream or unsalted butter
400g caviar or thinly sliced smoked salmon

Mix the plain and buckwheat flours with the dried yeast and salt in a bowl. In a small saucepan, gently heat the milk until tepid, then slowly stir it into the flour mix with a wooden spoon until it forms a smooth batter. Cover and set aside in a warm place for about 2 hours or until it has doubled in bulk.

Beat the egg yolk into the batter, followed by the sour cream and melted butter. Whisk the egg white until it forms stiff peaks and fold into the batter with a metal spoon. Cover and leave to rest for another 30 minutes.

Preheat a non-stick frying pan over a medium-low heat. Lightly grease with sunflower oil or clarified butter. Once hot, drop four separate spoonfuls of batter into the pan to make 4 blinis, each 5cm in diameter. Cook for 2 minutes or until golden underneath and puffy on top. Flip over and cook for a further 2 minutes or until golden.

Set aside until you have 12 blinis, then divide between 4 plates and serve with lashings of sour cream or butter, and the smoked salmon or caviar of your choice.

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