If the following is dull, I didn't write it. If it's very, very, very interesting, I didn't write it either......
Origins
Pancake Day, or Shrove Tuesday, is the traditional feast day before the start of Lent on Ash Wednesday. Lent - the 40 days leading up to Easter - was traditionally a time of fasting and on Shrove Tuesday Christians went to confession and were "shriven" (absolved from their sins). It was the last opportunity to use eggs and fats before embarking on the Lenten fast and pancakes are the perfect way of using up these ingredients.
Shrove Tuesday always falls 47 days before to Easter Sunday, so the date varies from year to year and falls between February 3 and March 9.
This year Pancake Day is on 28 February 2006. Next year in 2007 it will be on 20 February and in 2008 it will be on 5 February.
Pancake tradition
A thin, flat cake, made of batter and baked on a griddle or fried in a pan, the pancake has a very long history and featured in cookbooks as far back as 1439. The tradition of tossing or flipping them is almost as old: "And every man and maide doe take their turne, And tosse their Pancakes up for feare they burne." (Pasquil's Palin, 1619).
Tossing pancakes
Certainly these days part of the fun of cooking pancakes is in the tossing. To toss a pancake successfully takes a combination of the perfect pancake and good technique - it's so easy to get it wrong and end up with half the pancake still stuck to the pan while the other half is stuck to the ceiling or floor. All in all, it's probably best to practise a few times without an audience.
Where does the word Shrove come from?
The name Shrove comes from the old word "shrive" which means to confess. On Shrove Tuesday, in the Middle Ages, people used to confess their sins so that they were forgiven before the season of Lent began.
Pancakes around the world
The relative ease of baking on hot stoves or on griddles has resulted in a variety of pancakes around the world. Old English batter was mixed with ale. German and French pancakes, leavened by eggs and much beating, are baked very thin and served with sweet or savoury fillings. The French crêpe is thin and crispy - a crêpe suzette is folded or rolled and heated in a sauce of butter, sugar, citrus juice, and liqueur.
Russian blinis, usually prepared with buckwheat, are thin, crisp pancakes, and commonly served with caviar and sour cream or folded over and filled with cream cheese or jam. Mexico has its tortilla, which is often served folded over a bean or meat filling and topped by tomato sauce.
American pancakes are thicker. They are sometimes called battercakes, griddlecakes, or flapjacks and are usually leavened with baking powder or baking soda and served with syrup.
Mardi Gras
The French name (literally "fat Tuesday") for Shrove Tuesday has been given to a number of Mardi Gras carnivals around the world. Among the most famous are those of Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans.
Record breakers
Pancake tossing is also a very serious pastime for some people - Ralf Laue from Leipzig broke the world record by tossing a pancake 416 times in two minutes and Mike Cuzzacrea ran a marathon while continually tossing a pancake for three hours, two minutes and 27 seconds. The world's biggest pancake was cooked in Rochdale in 1994. It was an amazing 15 metres in diameter, weighed three tonnes and had an estimated two million calories.
Here's one of many pancake recipes
INGREDIENTS
1/2 Ib (220g) self raising flour
1 pint (500 ml)milk
2 eggs
pinch salt
1 1/2 oz (40 g) lard
1 lemon
sugar for sprinkling
METHOD
Sieve the flour and salt into a basin, making a well in the centre. Break the eggs one at a time and pour into the well. Gradually beat the eggs and flour together, adding the milk little by little until creamy consisitency has been reached. Beat the batter for a few minutes to aerate it, and leave to stand for an hour or so if possible.
Heat the frying pan or griddle with a little lard and pour enough batter to cover the area needed. Cook until the top is dry, and then either toss or turn the pancake and cook the other side until brown.
Turn out onto a greaseproof paper, sprinkle with sugar and lemon juice as desired and roll up before serving.
PANCAKE SONG
Mix a pancake,
Stir a pancake,
Pop it in the pan.
Fry the pancake,
Toss the pancake,
Catch it if you can.
~Christina Rossetti~[/b]
More interesting stuff
Nobody knows just how long people have been making and eating pancakes but you could almost call the flat bread made by primitive families twelve thousand years ago, a pancake. Pancakes were made by grinding grains and nuts and adding water or milk. This mixture was then shaped into flattened cakes and baked on the hot stones surrounding the fire.
I suspect that the making and eating of pancakes has always been much the same… a noisy, stimulating, exhilarating, greedy, happy time. Pancakes just seem to affect people that way. So it's not too surprising that two happy events for people… pancakes and festivals are often linked together.
Perhaps the best known one is Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day, which heralds the beginning of fasting in Lent. On this day (so the historians say) there were feasts of pancakes to use up the supplies of fat, butter and eggs... foods that were forbidden during austere Lent.
In England there arc several celebrations on this day but perhaps the best known one is the Pancake Day Race at Olney in Buckinghamshire which has been held since 1445. The race came about when a woman cooking pancakes heard the shriving bell summoning her to confession. She ran to church wearing her apron and still holding her frying pan, and thus without knowing it, started a tradition that has lasted for over five hundred years.
According to the current rules, only women wearing a dress, no slacks or jeans, an apron and a hat or scarf, may take part in the race. Each contestant has a frying pan containing a hot, cooking pancake. She must toss it three times during the race that starts at the market square at 11.55 am. The first woman to complete the winding 375 metre course (the record is 63 seconds set in 1967) and arrive at the church, serve her pancake to the bellringer and be kissed by him, is the winner.
She also receives a prayer book from the vicar
On the same day at 11 am at Westminster School in London, a verger from the Abbey leads a procession of eager boys into the playground of the school for the Annual Pancake Grease.
The school cook, who must be something of an athlete to manage it, tosses a huge pancake over a five metre high bar and the boys frantically scramble for a piece. The scholar who emerges from the scrum with the largest piece receives a cash bonus from the Dean. The cook also gets a reward.
Across the Channel in France the main ceremonial day, for pancake eating is Candlemas on the 2nd of February. This holy day is six weeks after Christmas and is the day that Christ was presented at the temple by his mother. During this festival, French children wear masks and demand pancakes and fritters.
In various parts of the country, there are different customs. In Province, if you hold a coin in your left hand while you toss a pancake, you'll be rich. And in Brie the first pancake (which is never very good anyway) is always given to the hen that laid the eggs that made the pancake. And it's always regarded as bad luck to let a pancake fall on the floor while tossing it.
Legend has it that Napoleon, who liked to make and eat them with Josephine, blamed the failure of his Russian campaign on one he had dropped years before at Malmaison during Candlemas.
Pancakes are the traditional treat of the Jewish Hanukkah festival. They are fried in oil to commemorate the oil found by the Maccabeans when they recaptured Jerusalem from the Syrians, two thousand years ago. The one day's supply of oil for the temple lamps burned miraculously for one week. And, tradition says, the wives of the soldiers hurriedly cooked pancakes behind the lines for their warring husbands.
Large or small, fat or wafer thin and made with a wide range of flours, pancakes are given different names by different peoples. There are Hungarian palacsinta, Chinese egg rolls, Jewish blintzes, Russian blini, Italian cannelloni, Swedish plattar, Mexican tortillas, American hotcakes, German pfannkucken, Norwegian lefser, Austrian nockerin, Welsh crempog and Australian pikelets: but undoubtedly the most famous of them all is the great French crepe.
From Pancake and Crepe Cookery by
Diana Daisy published by Ure Smith