Pancake Recipes - Pancake Day

Pancake Day
To celebrate Pancake Day in traditional style you'll have to break a few eggs - but it's worth it. Find out about the history of Pancake Day and try some of our pancake recipes.
In this article
Origins
Pancake tradition
Tossing pancakes
Pancakes around the world
Mardi Gras
Record breakers
Recipes

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.
Pancake tradition
The pancake has a very long history and featured in cookbooks as far back as 1439
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.
Pancake races
In the UK, pancake races also form an important part of the Shrove Tuesday celebrations - an opportunity for large numbers of people to race down the streets tossing pancakes.

More:


World Famous Pancake Recipes