Shrove Tuesday – Pancake Day!

Shrove Tuesday

For most of us pancakes are pretty standard breakfast fare but in the United Kingdom and other countries including Ireland, Canada and Australia there’s a designated day on which to honor the flat cuisine.

Shrove Tuesday (popularly known as Pancake Day) is their substitute for Mardis Gras, so while the rest of the world is out on the streets, frenetically dancing off the calories, these guys stuff their faces with butter, sugar and eggs. But how on earth do you dedicate an entire day to pancakes?

Shrove Tuesday’s roots are first recorded over 1,000 years ago, when Christians confessed their sins in preparation for the 40 days of fasting that commenced on Ash Wednesday. Traditionally, Pancake Day was the last chance to get something fatty and sugary into the system. Although hardly anyone genuinely fasts today, that doesn’t stop them from going ahead with the easy bit of the ritual.

On Pancake Day, families and friends whip up jugs of pancake mixture and fry up endless batches, filling them with all sorts of savory and sweet delights. Of all the fillings that go with pancake, lemon juice and sugar has oddly become a firm favorite.

But eating the pancakes is only half of the fun. The pancake race is a popular ‘sport’ in which villagers and townsfolk line up with a pancake still in the pan, then sprint toward a finish line, constantly flipping as they make the dash. If you’re not flipping all the way, you face disqualification.

It’s said this tradition originates from when a housewife from Olney (near Milton Keynes in the UK)  only realized she was late for church when she heard the bells pealing, and left the house in such a hurry, she forgot to let go of the pan.

The pancake race is notably less violent than the predating Shrove Tuesday mediaeval game of mob football, in which whole rival villages of men, in celebration of a rare day off work, would tussle to get a ball (back then probably a blown up pig’s bladder) to a certain point in the competing village.

Here is an account of the game from 1514 by one Alexander Barclay:

“They get the bladder and blowe it great and thin,
With many beanes and peason put within,
It ratleth, shineth and soundeth clere and fayre,
While it is throwen and caste up in the eyre,
Eche one contendeth and hath a great delite,
With foote and hande the bladder for to smite,
If it fall to the ground they lifte it up again…
Overcometh the winter with driving the foote-ball.”

As you can imagine, with no health and safety back then, these games could be violent and dangerous, so much so in fact, that in 1314, Edward II passed a decree banning the brutal sport.

Let’s leave you with a quote from the incorrigible W.C. Fields. “The laziest man I ever met put popcorn in his pancakes so they would turn over by themselves.”