Confessions of a pancake lover
Related Articles
Today is Shrove Tuesday, or as we Irish refer to it, 'Pancakes-with-caster-sugar-and-concentrated-lemon-juice Tuesday'.
Pancakes were traditionally made to use up all the rich foodstuffs -- butter, eggs, sugar -- in households before they embarked on their Lenten campaign of abstinence on Ash Wednesday.
Now few of us give anything up for Lent -- but we still like to observe the gluttony bit at the start.
Shrove Tuesday gets its name from the verb 'to shrive', which means to hear confessions.
And the priests gave short shrift to anyone who confessed to eating too many pancakes.
The period between New Year and Shrove Tuesday was traditionally a good time to get married, as weddings were not allowed during the Lenten period.
In the late 1800s, the unmarried were often marked with chalk on their way to church on the first Sunday of Lent for their shame.
Being married on Shrove Tuesday was no great laugh either -- you might get roped into the pancake races, in which housewives had to race to a finish line, tossing thin pancakes in a thick skillet all the way.
