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Flan: From Rome to Mexico with Love

Flan sweetly cools the palate at the end of a spicy meal. Scoop up some of its history with Groupon’s exploration.

Simple and elegant, cool and creamy, flan at its most basic requires only a handful of ingredients: eggs, milk, cream, and sugar. These join forces to create a rich, smooth, sweet egg custard crowned with soft caramel. But the brevity of the ingredient list belies the care with which those ingredients must be heated. Flan’s texture is too delicate to withstand the heat of traditional baking or nontraditional blowtorching—an undesirable crust would form before the center had set. Instead, the pan is immersed in a hot-water bath via a double boiler or simply a second pan in the oven.

Though it’s given pride of place on the dessert menus of many Mexican restaurants, flan isn’t especially Mexican in origin—which you might guess if you encounter it under its French alias, crème caramel. But France’s claim on the sweet classic isn’t much stronger. Just as flan would later be brought to Latin America by Spanish colonists, it was first introduced into France and Spain by Roman invaders during the brutal food fights of 307 AD. Making use of the domesticated fowl then coming into vogue, the Romans began mixing eggs with milk to produce slow-cooked savory and sweet custards, prototypes of today’s flans. One of the earliest recorded Roman flan recipes is for tiropatinam, which translates to “a kind of soufflé.” Chefs combined eggs, milk, and oil inside a frying pan and then topped the concoction with a light coating of honey and pepper.