This week saw one of my favourite celebrated days in Ireland: Pancake Tuesday. It’s self-explanatory, really, but I’ll elaborate anyway. Most of the world calls it Shrove Tuesday, Britain titles it ‘Pancake Day’ and Ireland and Australia dub it ‘Pancake Tuesday’. Shrove Tuesday is the day before Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent in the Christian calendar. For many stoic Christians this means forty days of good works and multiple church visits. For me, it brings back memories of sugar withdrawal symptoms and the longing for Sunday, when one “goody” was allowed.
The typical “Lent thing” to do as a kid in Ireland, was, and still is, to give up sweets for the forty days of Lent. This unnatural abstinence led to commendable gormandising of about five chocolate Easter Eggs at 6am, Easter Sunday. This was followed by sprawling in front of the TV for the day to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey for the sixteenth time, which, for some bizarre reason, is repeated nearly every year in Ireland. Some kids gave up sweets and put the money saved into the “Trócaire Box.” These are cardboard foldout boxes distributed during Lent to collect donations in and be returned to the church on Easter Sunday. ‘Trócaire’ is the Irish word for mercy. ‘Trócaire’ are always successful in collecting money; I mean, who doesn’t love constructing a box out of flattened cardboard and then utilising your own creation? You actually want to put the money in.
Some families, including my own, had a different slant on the whole “giving up sweets for Lent” thing, which caused some consternation among the more hardcore, fructose-denied kids on the playground. It was more of an “accumulation of sweets for Lent” for us. My brother Dermot and I were allowed to save all the sweets that we normally would have eaten over Lent in an old biscuit tin and save them for Easter Sunday. So really it was a win-win situation. We weren’t actually losing out on any sweets; it was just a matter of patience. Not only did we have multiple Cadbury’s chocolate eggs from relatives to digest, but we also had a whole six weeks of backdated sugar to get through. We put quite a dent in this stockpile within the first half of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The beginning of this traumatic sweet-less six weeks was made easier by the wonderful Pancake Tuesday. In fact, by our third round of pancakes, Lent wasn’t even in our vocabulary. Lent marks the forty days and forty nights that Jesus fasted in the desert, according to the gospels, to redeem the human race. In return, fasting was commonplace in local communities. Instead of sweets that were forborne, it was milk and eggs, since these were perishable items and wouldn’t keep over the six-week period. The pancake was an ideal way to use up these ingredients.
The pancake I’m talking about is very different than the pancakes in the US. They’re finer, similar to the French crêpe, but even tastier. I fondly recall dashing home from school where my mother would be in the corner of the kitchen with a huge jug of pancake mix* sitting beside the gas cooker. As soon as I arrived, the batter was carefully poured onto the pan and sizzled away until golden brown patterns appeared on the front. The pancake was flipped over back and forth until perfect, then laid out onto a piece of greaseproof paper and sprinkled with a touch of castor sugar and a squeeze of lemon juice. The pancake was then transported to my plate where I was ready with a sharp knife and a slab of ice cream, which I enveloped by rolling the pancake around it. Nothing can compare to the balance of the cold ice cream in the middle, the layer of melting ice cream that meets the pancake and the hot pancake itself. While I made good work of the plate, pancake part two was being prepared and perfectly timed to be on my plate after my last mouthful of pancake part one. It was a cyclical process, only halted by the jug dimensions. My best friend Sarah (renowned for her ketchup and banana sandwiches) discovered that a banana within the pancake could also create a wonderful delicacy. Although the tradition of giving up sweets may have sizzled out over the years, I’ll always have time to toss a few pancakes before Lent.
*The exact recipe was in last Tuesday’s Argus and can be found online in the archives. Make sure to add a half-pint of milk and not a pint as was misprinted.
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