Shrove Tuesday!
Next Tuesday 12th
is Shrove Tuesday, once also called Mischief Day and the last day
before Lent, when any rich luxury foods were used up in the house
like; eggs, milk, meat and butter, prior to fasting for forty days.
In Toni Arthur's
iconic early 1980's book All the Year Round, http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/0140313206/ref=dp_olp_0?ie=UTF8&condition=all
she
talks about all the different regional traditional dishes that were
made on Shrove Tuesday like broth in Scotland, doughnuts in
Hertfordshire, frying pan pudding in Lincolnshire and pea soup in
Cornwall. But of course the most famous is pancakes!
Toni
quotes an old West Somerset rhyme once recited in homes locally after
eating pancakes:
Tippety, tippety
tin,
Give me a pancake
and I'll come in.
Tipperty,
tipperty toe,
Give me a pancake
and then I'll go.
Georgian
cookery writer Hannah Glasse provides us with her own recipe of 1780,
in which she includes several variations of pancake; those made with
cinnamon, mace and nutmeg.
However
her basic pancake recipe reads like this:
To make pancakes
'Take
a quart of milk, beat in six or eight eggs, leaving half the whites
out; mix it well till your batter is of a fine thickness. You must
observe to mix your flour first with a little milk, then add the rest
by degrees; put in two spoonfuls of beaten ginger, a glass of brandy,
a little salt, stir all together, make your stew pan very clean, put
in a piece of butter as big as a walnut, then pour in a ladleful of
batter, which will make a pancake, moving the pan round that the
batter be all over the pan; shake the pan, and when yo think that the
side is enough, toss it; if you can't, turn it cleverly, and when
both sides are done, lay it in a dish before the fire, and so do the
rest'.
Hannah
cautions 'you must take care they are dry; when you send
them to table throw a little sugar over them'.
Objects from the Museum of Kitchenalia that might have been used to
make this recipe in the past include
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| Two 'rat-tail' handled forks, both attributed to Daniel & Arter (Birmingham) c.1890
©Museum of Kitchenalia
| |
 | |
| Pearlware Pottery Ladle mid 1800's ©Museum of Kitchenalia |
 |
| Gill measure from the early 1900's©Museum of Kitchenalia |
