Pancake Day

What the day is

Pancake Day is the popular name for Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. Its date moves with Easter, falling 47 days before it, which puts it anywhere from early February to early March.

Two separate commercial promotions also share the name: IHOP's charity fundraiser in late February or early March, and a September 26 National Pancake Day that several other chains now run, descended from a 2005 novelty day called Lumberjack Day. Both are marketing events rather than traditional observances, and all three get confused because they share a name.

Origin and background

The traditional day has a practical origin. Lent historically meant giving up eggs, butter, milk and fat for forty days, and a household with those things in the larder needed to use them before the fast began. A pancake uses all of them at once, which is why the food and the date are attached to each other.

Shrove comes from shrive, meaning to confess and be absolved, which is what the day before Lent was for. The same day is Mardi Gras in French-speaking traditions, Carnival across much of Europe and Latin America, and Fastnacht in German ones: the same impulse to use up richness and indulge before a fast, expressed at very different volumes.

Britain and Ireland kept the pancake specifically, along with pancake races, in which competitors run while flipping a pancake in a pan. The best-known has been run in Olney, Buckinghamshire for centuries.

The pancake in question is not the American breakfast stack. It is thin, closer to a crepe, served with lemon and sugar.

How to take part

• Rest the batter for half an hour, which makes noticeably more tender pancakes.
• Accept that the first one is a write-off. It calibrates the pan.
• Use a thin film of butter and a small ladle of batter. The pan should be hot enough that it sets on contact.
• Lemon and sugar first, before anything more elaborate. It is the traditional pairing and hard to improve on.
• Flip one in the air at least once, with a towel on the floor.