Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | October 1, 2025
I just got around to last week’s episode of The Great British Baking Show, and I was wondering if other Americans were confused by the first challenge. It was “Back to School Week,” so the challenges were school-themed, and the first one involved baking flapjacks.
I thought it was an unusual challenge because I don’t associate flapjacks with school, and also, we don’t bake flapjacks; we use a griddle. Or a pan. This became even more confusing when the first baker they spoke to, Tom, said he was going to hide his flapjack in an apple.
How do you hide a flapjack in an apple?
Of course, I soon discovered the source of confusion. In Britain, flapjacks are not pancakes. Flapjacks are oat squares — something akin to a homemade granola bar. How does this make sense?
I understand there are word differences between American and British English. There are classics: Britain calls the bathroom a loo, a truck a lorry, football is soccer, a trunk is a boot, sweaters are jumpers, fries are chips, chips are crisps, and of course, there’s also fanny. In Boston, I had two British roommates, and we lived across the street from a Frugal Fannies. That was fun.
But an oat bar is a flapjack? How does that make sense? It doesn’t! While I would usually defer to England on matters like these — what with American English growing out of British English — in this case, England is flat-out wrong. The term originated to describe a flat cake in a pan, specifically the flap referring to the flipping of a cake in a pan.
Britain lost all sense of the original meaning. There may be an indirect line between a flat cake and a traybake-style dessert, but there’s no flapping of an oaty bar. It’s madness!
To make things even more confusing, if you order a pancake in Britain, you’ll get something closer to a crêpe — wide, flat, and rolled or folded with sugar, lemon juice, jam, or Nutella. You could order a Scotch pancake, which is closer to an American pancake, except they’re usually eaten with tea instead of stacked for breakfast (they’re also called drop scones). And they don’t even put syrup on them.
So, if you want a pancake in Britain, don’t ask for a pancake. Or a flapjack. You have to ask for American-style pancakes, because we’re the geniuses who came up with stacking thick, fluffy cake spheres on top of each other and dribbling maple syrup over them.
Related: I grew up in the South and never had real maple syrup until I moved to New England. At first, I raged because it cost $15 for real maple syrup (compared to $3 for Mrs. Butterworth’s). But then I went to a Chicago diner last week, and because they apparently give you a side of pancakes with every breakfast order, I asked for real maple syrup. They said they didn’t have any, and the waiter acted like no one had ever asked that before. Then he brought out some sugar-free fake syrup and thought that would satisfy us, and that’s when I realized that after 25 years in New England, I’d somehow become a real maple syrup snob. But also, WTF, Chicago? Canada is not that far away. Real maple syrup should be the default!
