Pancake Day!

4th March 2014

This day in history...Pancake Day, Pancake Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Malasada Day, Bursting Day, Carnival...

To most of us, Pancake Day is time to make, flip and eat as many pancakes as physically possible without being sick. It is a time of eating pancakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner and experimenting with crazy things to put on top. But where does Pancake Day originally come from?

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Shrove Tuesday derives from the word shrive, meaning 'confess'. As Shrove Tuesday precedes Ash Wednesday, the first day of lent, it is a time of self-examination, consideration of any wrong doings, repenting and making amendments to areas of life that need God's help. In case you hadn't already guessed, Pancake Day is a religious celebration; Christians, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists and Roman Catholics. This has been a celebration since the earliest times of the Church. As lent is a forty-day period of sacrifices - and traditionally fasting - Shrove Tuesday is a day in which to indulge in foods that will be given up for lent. 

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Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, 1559

Why Pancakes? Pancakes are used for Shrove Tuesday as they use up rich foods such as eggs, milk and sugar which are not consumed during lent. The traditional fasting perios emphasises eating plainer foods and refraining from eating foods that give pleasure. The use of pancakes for Srove Tuesday is celebrated in UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada

and a few other nations. Other countries celebrate it in different ways; 

• Portuguese, Spanish and Italian speaking countries have large carnivals and eat meat
• Madeira uses up all the lard and sugar in the house
• Denmark and Norway have festivals and feasts
• Iceland eats salted meat and peas
• Sweden eat pastry
• Finland ear green pea soup and pastry
• Poland have eating contests and music...the list goes on

Most nations also have various games and festivities like pancake races and contests.

Image retrieved from Google. Will remove at owner's request.
Pancake Races.

Whats your favorite Pancake topping/filling?

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