Pancake day

One thing that amuses most Americans in England is that the English have never had what we call pancakes. It turns out there is a reason for this: the English have a whole holiday devoted to their version of a pancake, Pancake Day. The Tuesday before Lent is known as Pancake Day and is celebrated by making large thin 'pancakes' (they're more like crepes) that can be eaten, it seems, with almost anything. Originally this served to clear out all the rich ingredients in the pantry before the fast for Lent began.

I got to experience my first Pancake Day celebration this weekend; a friend combined it with her birthday party and asked us to meet her at a pancake restaurant in Chelsea. My first pancake was covered in bacon, apples, and maple syrup, and the second had fruit salad and ice cream. Yum!

Shakespeare celebrated Pancake Day too. It's referred to twice in his plays, once in All's Well That Ends Well:

Countess: Will your answer serve fit to all questions?

Clown: As fit as ten groats is for the hand of an attorney, as your French crown for your taffeta punk, as Tib's rush for Tom's forefinger, as a pancake for Shrove Tuesday, a morris for May-day, as the nail to his hole, the cuckold to his horn, as a scolding queen to a wrangling knave, as the nun's lip to the friar's mouth, nay, as the pudding to his skin.

And once in a rather obscure joke in As You Like It that can possibly be explained if the play was first performed at a celebration of Pancake Day. It was traditional for Pancake Day celebrations to include the performance of plays for the monarch:

Touchstone: Mistress, you must come away to your father.

Celia: Were you made the messenger?

Touchstone: No, by mine honour; but I was bid to come for you.

Rosalind: Where learned you that oath, fool?

Touchstone: Of a certain knight that swore by his honour they were good pancakes, and swore by his honour the mustard was naught: now, I’ll stand to it, the pancakes were naught and the mustard was good, and yet was not the knight forsworn.

Celia: How prove you that, in the great heap of your knowledge?

Rosalind: Ay, marry: now unmuzzle your wisdom.

Touchstone: Stand you both forth now: stroke your chins, and swear by your beards that I am a knave.

Celia: By our beards, if we had them, thou art.

Touchstone: By my knavery, if I had it, then I were; but if you swear by that that is not, you are not forsworn: no more was this knight, swearing by his honour, for he never had any; or if he had, he had sworn it away before ever he saw those pancakes or that mustard.