Shrove Tuesday is the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. It is both a day of penitence, to clean the soul, and a day of celebration. It is the last chance to feast before Lent begins and pancakes are the order of the day.
However, there is more to Shrove Tuesday than pigging out on pancakes or taking part in a pancake race, the pancakes themselves forming part of an ancient custom with deeply religious roots.
Shrove Tuesday gets its name from the ritual of shriving that Christians used to undergo in the past. In shriving, a person confesses their sins and receives absolution for them. When a person receives absolution for their sins, they are forgiven and released from the guilt and pain that they have caused them. In the Catholic or Orthodox church, the absolution is pronounced by a priest.
The tradition is very old, and more than 1000 years ago a monk wrote in the Anglo-Saxon Ecclesiastical Institutes: ‘In the week immediately before Lent everyone shall go to his confessor and confess his deeds and the confessor shall so shrive him’.
Shrove Tuesday is a day of celebration as well as penitence, because it’s the last day before Lent, a time for abstinence and of giving things up. It is the last chance to indulge yourself and to use up the foods that aren’t allowed in Lent.
The idea was to give up foods, not waste them. In the old days there were many foods that observant Christians would not eat during Lent, foods such as meat and fish, fats, eggs, and milky foods. So that no food was wasted, families would have a feast on the shriving Tuesday, and eat up all the foods that wouldn’t last the forty days of Lent without going off.
The need to eat up the fats gave rise to the French name Mardi Gras, meaning Fat Tuesday. Pancakes became associated with Shrove Tuesday as they were a dish that could use up all the eggs, fats and milk in the house with just the addition of flour.
Pancake races are thought to have begun in 1445 when a woman was busy cooking pancakes for Shrove Tuesday and lost all track of time. Suddenly she heard the church bell ringing to call the faithful to church for confession, and she raced out of her house and ran all the way to church, still holding her frying pan and wearing her apron.
One of the most famous pancake races is held at Olney in Buckinghamshire over a 415 yard course. The rules are very strict. Contestants, wearing an apron and a scarf, have to toss their pancake at both the start and the finish. The race is followed by a church service. Since 1950, Olney has competed with Liberal in Kansas, which holds an identical race, to see which town can produce the fastest competitor.
Elsewhere, at 11am 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 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.
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. Customs vary across the country.
In Province, if you hold a coin in your left hand while you toss a pancake, you’ll be rich. In Brie, the first pancake 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.
According to legend, Napoleon, who liked to make and eat pancakes with Josephine, blamed the failure of his Russian campaign on one he had dropped years before at Malmaison during Candlemas.
Pancakes are also 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. According to tradition, the wives of the soldiers hurriedly cooked pancakes behind the lines for their warring husbands.