Shrove Tuesday!

Shrove Tuesday!

Next Tuesday 12^th 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

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