dzamie

Ah. I grew up with squashed fly biscuits, which horrified most of my friends. Flapjacks as bars is new to me. They aren't in any of the books I've read. I wonder if they're new, last hundred years, or if I have just been reading the wrong books.

I'm pretty sure I've had some oat bar kinda things before that basically just seem like the same thing but not named flapjack because America

ah yes, the meat honey

(actual thing produced by vulture bees. may be gross to look up, but the bees are stingless and the honey is apparently odd but delicious?)

huh! neat

so, everything I'm seeing says that flapjack meant either pancake or a kind of apple tart in the UK, and only really meant "pancake" in the USA and its preceding English colonies. so I may need to see where you're sourcing this from. like, the use of "flapjack" for a pancake or tart dates back to the late 1500s, not 1920. this pre-dates the earliest English colony in North America.

in fact, the reason why the split you're talking about might've happened, with a thing made of cornmeal, is that among the earliest recipes for pancakes written down in English here, in 1796, was a recipe for something called a (groaning at bad old terms here) "Indian slapjack" which was made with cornmeal instead of more familiar European grains. slapjack is just another variant on the term shape of "flapjack".

... is this where I find out, after my half-joking after actual research posting, that y'all in the UK would look at an American flapjack and go "that's too thick to be a pancake, I don't know what this is?" because they are big fluffy things with the consistency of a corn bread, typically. our spread of what we consider a pancake goes very thick to fairly thin, as long as it's not like, a crepe