Have we Forgotten the True Meaning of Pancake Tuesday?

It starts quietly. You might notice a couple of bags of flour in the corner of the supermarket just after Christmas. By mid January, there are pans and bottles of batter mix kicking around. Before you know it, it’s February and you can’t get Pancake Day songs out of your head and there are no good Shrove cards left on the shelves. 

I remember growing up, getting excited on Pancake Tuesday Eve. I’d struggle to get to sleep and when I woke up at an annoyingly early time the whole house would have to rally before we could go downstairs and check to see if Father Lent had been. He always had, leaving maple syrup under the Shrove tree because we’d been good that year. 

This annual festival of *squints* “Using up flour, milk and eggs before 40 days of fasting” has felt a bit random and detached for me. Having been raised in a mostly catholic house in the noughties, our preparation for Lent wasn’t about using up the things we planned to give up but rather buying the things we needed to substitute what we were cutting out.

“What are you giving up for lent?” - “Chocolate this year”, I’d respond, as if it wasn’t the same every year; and without mentioning that my sister and I were about to dramatically increase our consumption of Nestle Caramacs and McVitie's Gold Bars, as while they are chocolate-like, they do not contain any cocoa. Catholic school may never have taught me how to use a condom but at least I know the religious loopholes that allow one to survive 40 days without a Dairy Milk.

The traditional list of things that are supposed to be used up ahead of fasting is now very out of date. The modern pancake recipe can now include cinnamon, buttermilk, buckwheat flour, sour cream and any number of things the middle class pancake flipper wants to include. 

 While I was kidding at the start about the commercial prominence of this special day (apart from the songs - who doesn't love a heartwarming rendition of Nat King Cole singing “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, pancakes flipping on the stove”?) I have seen slightly more things than I have in previous years, like stands in supermarkets offering frying pan and batter mix combo-deals that made me think, who is this for? That said, it was a nice looking pan; the one with the red dot in the middle that used to only be sold by JML at Woolworths. 

There’s a fairly successful track record of taking religious holidays and events, slapping some capitalist gloss on them and turning them into secular societal norms. I’m not lamenting the dereligionisation of these events but I just think that if we’re going to put all our eggs (hiya Easter, we don’t have time for you right now) into the Shrove Tuesday basket, let’s lead with the better version. 

Early at work recently a colleague brought in a bag of doughnuts and proclaimed ‘Happy fat Thursday’. Before I had the chance to take great offence and explain that I was still carrying some baby fat, she explained that in Poland they don’t have pancakes on a Tuesday but doughnuts five days before and it’s called Fat Thursday or tłusty czwartek. Despite the cost of ingredients being  20-30% higher than a year ago, Poles still queued out the door and round the block for the sweet treats.

We’ve been whisking batter, scratching pans and saying ‘the first one is always crap’  for years when we could have been having a box of  delicious “pączki” filled with fruit or rose jam. It could already be catching on in the UK as this year a Polish bakery in Leeds sold 1500 donuts in one day… Which sounds like a challenge I'd be willing to accept.