These are an incredibly quick and elegant breakfast. The traditional way to make them is as crêpes suzettes, which is filled with an orange-flavored butter, topped with an orange sauce, and then flamed with brandy or Cointreau. That requires prep work, but just making the crêpes themselves is easy and fast, and they don’t require the full treatment to be amazing.
They can be eaten on their own, merely buttered, or filled with just about anything you enjoy on bread.
This recipe is from the typewritten notes of a viewer of the Chicago-area Home Cooking with Eddie Doucette. That cooking show appears to be all but forgotten today; it ran in 1954, eight years before Julia Child’s French Chef. Doucette appears to have been something of a local celebrity. He is the Eddie Doucette in Eddie Doucette’s Pancake Plantation, a restaurant that a handful of locals still remember fondly.
Judging from old newspaper television guides, Home Cooking covered a gamut of cooking topics, but the recipes copied down by this viewer appear to be complex recipes made easy. Viewers are shown, step-by-step, how to make lobster bisque, Miami chicken, crêpes suzettes, and croissants. Each step is easy, and they combine to elegant dishes.
Doucette would go on to become the face of the IGA grocery store chain, presenting recipes in IGA newspaper ads throughout the areas served by franchisees.
Yet still, ever after that sorrowful day,
Whenever the Butcher was by,
The Beaver kept looking the opposite way,
And appeared unaccountably shy. — Lewis Carroll (The Hunting of the Snark)