I recently received an odd email from Macy’s. It said that the retailer understood that not everyone wanted to receive Mother’s Day emails and offered me the opportunity to opt out of those missives.

I’m not sure why Mother’s Day was singled in out that way. Perhaps Macy’s executives were worried that people whose mothers had died (or people who hated their mothers, or people who didn’t like being mothers) would be saddened by reminders of the holiday.

My mother, Jan Hallett Weisblat, has been dead for more than 12 years. Nevertheless, I love the opportunity Mother’s Day gives me to remember her.

I often cook something my mother loved for this May holiday. This year I’m recalling her love of Paris with crêpes. They are classic Parisian street foods.

Jan, whom I called Taffy, had an ear for languages and studied French in high school. When she arrived at Mount Holyoke College at the age of 16, she decided to continue her studies in that language.

She was proud that her connection with French (along with her lifelong love of dramatics) was alluded to in the book “On a New England Campus,” published in 1937.

Author Frances Lester Warner, who had visited the college for a year, wrote, “We never had a more bewitching performance than the recent acting of a certain freshman in tall pointed hat and white cotton wig as ‘Le Médecin’ [the doctor] in Molière’s play.” That freshman was my mother.

The freshman’s favorite French professor, Paul Saintonge, and his wife Connie adopted a few students of French each year. Taffy/Jan joined their adoptees when she arrived on campus in 1935.

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In 1936 the Saintonges took her and a group of other students to France over summer vacation, and she fell irrevocably in love with the country and its capital.

She would spend her junior year abroad there, studying at the Sorbonne and living with a Parisian matron who found her American lodger unsophisticated but adorable. While in France Taffy became a social butterfly, flitting about a golden Europe on the cusp of world war.

Her skill with the French language also deepened from proficiency to knowledge during her time in Paris. “I learned that to speak excellent French was important, but that what I said was more important,” she recalled later in life.

When she returned to college her senior year, she was the president of “Le Foyer,” the small dorm on campus in which French was the only language spoken.

During her studies, she acquired such a flawless Parisian accent that she was often mistaken for a Frenchwoman. (My French was pretty darn good in my youth, but French people always knew I was American.) And she returned to Paris again and again throughout her life.

In 1953, she visited the city with my father and their infant son. Taffy hadn’t been back to her beloved Paris since its occupation by the Germans during World War II, which had worried her greatly.

On that return visit, she went to see a play at the Comédie-Française, France’s national theater. It was and is the oldest active theater company in the world. Taffy wrote in her diary:

“During the intermission I wandered into the lobby and delighted my soul further as I looked out through the colonnades at the fountains in front. I felt as tho [sic] I were re-finding Paris as I had loved it!

“And the life — the magnetic life of the city as I saw it again wandering through the streets, the narrow streets thronged with shops and people.” I like to think that my crêpes would have delighted her soul, too. I can’t replicate those shops and people, but I can recreate a little taste of Paris in her honor.

My crêpes, like most of the foods that I prepare, look a little ragged around the edges. They are delicious, however. My advice with crêpes, as with such other tricky foods as pie crust, is to show no fear. When ingredients sense fear, they make cooking difficult.

Crêpes can be either sweet or savory, and I include both types in the recipe below. My personal preference is for a savory crêpe, often referred to in France as a galette. I first tasted this treat filled with gooey melted cheese on one of my own visits to France.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Incidentally, bakers among our readers may want to spend the evening before Mother’s Day at Over the Top Bakery in Orange. The bakery is hosting a cookie bake-off on Saturday, May 11, from 5 to 8 p.m. There is an entry fee and an admission fee for those who wish merely to judge the cookies, but the winner will receive a prize and much glory.

Ingredients:

for the crêpes:

2 eggs

1 cup milk

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup flour

2 tablespoons melted butter

more butter as needed

for the fillings:

lots of butter

grated Gruyère or Jarlsberg cheese, OR lemon juice and sugar, with optional whipped cream and raspberries

Instructions:

Place the eggs in a blender, and blend them well. Add the milk, the salt, and the flour, and blend again on low speed. Blend in the melted butter.

Cover your blender bowl, and let the batter sit for at least 30 minutes before making the crêpes.

When you are ready to cook, melt a small amount of butter in an 8-inch nonstick frying pan over medium-low heat. Spread the butter around with a pastry brush or a paper towel.

Pour a few tablespoons of batter into the middle of the pan. Swirl the pan around to distribute the batter as well as you can into an even, flat pancake.

Cook for a couple of minutes, until the bottom is light brown and the edges can be lifted easily; then flip the crêpe and let it cook on the other side.

Remove the crêpe from the pan, and let it cool on a plate or rack.

Continue until you have used up your batter, adding butter to the pan as needed.

You may fill your crêpes to make them either savory or sweet. For savory crêpes (known as galettes), melt butter in an 8- or 10-inch nonstick frying pan. Spread it around as you did for the crêpes.

Place 1 cooked crêpe on the pan, let it cook for a few seconds in the butter, and then flip it over. Sprinkle grated cheese on top, and let it melt for a minute or so; then fold the crêpe over the cheese to make a half circle.

Cook until the cheese melts; then remove the galette from the heat and fold it over again. Repeat with the remaining crêpes.

The process for making sweet crêpes is similar, but instead of putting cheese on the inside you will sprinkle sugar and a small amount of lemon juice inside each crêpe. A dab of whipped cream and a few raspberries, added after cooking but before rolling or folding, make a nice addition.

Makes about 10 crêpes.

Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.