Good, batter, best
Imagine my dismay and confusion when I discovered this week that for several friends and colleagues, Pancake Day isn’t really ‘a thing’.
Not just the international ones, who you expect to need a bit of indoctrinating in the ways of UK lardiness — but born-and-raised Brits, shrugging and forgoing their annual right to eat fried batter until they almost pass out. It saddened me.
I should have twigged already, from the blank expressions when I launched into my traditional “give me crêpes or give me death” speech, that not many people take Shrove Tuesday as seriously as I do. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, except for all those other times that I say it’s the most wonderful time of the year. Burns Night. Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day. It’s the third most wonderful time of the year!
I suppose I can forgive people for feeling less jazzed about a festival of pancake-eating in 2019, when you can barely set foot outside your door without running into a stack of American buttermilk whatevers with bacon and maple syrup, or a banana-protein-griddle surprise — but there was a time, kids, when pancakes were a novelty. For years, I believed that the only ‘legal’ times to eat them were on Shrove Tuesday or at Center Parcs; both consecrated occasions that demanded proper reverence. Pancakes in July would have been chaos.
You can bitch for hours about the comparative merits of Nutella vs golden syrup vs melted chocolate, which ice cream is the correct ice cream, if said ice cream should be served within the pancake chamber or relegated to the outside, whether the ‘just lemon and sugar’ people are bad in bed (almost certainly) and if fannying about with savoury options makes you as bad or worse than Judas — in fact you SHOULD bitch for hours about all these things, that’s part of the joy — but personally I believe the only real prescription on Pancake Day is that whatever you eat, you eat a whole heap of it. Loads. The correct serving is loads.
I barely remember a Shrove Tuesday that didn’t end with me lying in a queasy haze, rubbing my belly and wishing I could go back 15 minutes to a time before I poured all the remaining batter into the pan, made an inch-thick mutant and said “hey, would melted cheese and marshmallows work???” to nobody in particular. Never do I binge so lavishly and systematically as I do on Pancake Day. Religiously, you might say. Because of course, it’s Lent tomorrow.
My family goes big on Lent. We always have. It’s a religious thing, but also just part of the fabric of the year; one of the ritual touchstones that is there to hang your hat on and stop the months all blurring into one.
Right now the Bravo WhatsApp group is full of pledges and updates — Dad’s been running, my brother has written two poems and eaten a pear, Mum’s done some gardening but isn’t sure yet if that was incidental. Meanwhile I’m playing for time. I like to give it a couple of days before looking back, identifying something I haven’t eaten/done yet and going ‘that, that is my Lenten vow!’
To be fair to my parents, they always suggested it was better to take something up, positively, rather than giving something up — but I could never resist the challenge of self-denial. At school my friends were so madly competitive over Lent that a fight about whether Mini Cheddars count as crisps (they do, it’s contextual, don’t @ me) still rages to this day.
I always thought it was normal to ride the year through like a rollercoaster of indulgent highs and abstemious lows, waving your hands in the air like you just don’t care one minute, and then wringing them over a contraband HobNob the next. If we were going to get existential about it, I’d say it’s something to do with the eternal push-pull mortality: do you live for today, or for the tomorrow you hope will be better? Is abstinence really good for the soul? Is it nicer to have a bag of Maltesers right now, or 40 days in the chocolate wilderness followed by three-day Lindt bender and a sugar migraine? Shh, that was rhetorical. Shh.
But it’s only in recent years that I’ve noticed other people don’t go in so hard on the whole self-betterment thing. Not everyone, I’m realising, rides the rollercoaster. They cruise along in a self-betterment rowboat, gently and consistently towards to horizon. Or they just moor up and have a picnic and a nap.
Without the rituals and calendar prompts to go hard and then go home, I always assumed I’d feel all at sea. But then again, maybe I wouldn’t.
Because if I’m ever going to break up with the diet culture that has kept me bound to repetition and doomed to failure all these years, then I need to get off the rollercoaster. Perhaps life is full of enough challenges to bother imposing your own. Maybe Pancake Day can just be another (really delicious) day.
Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, however. Now that’s a festival to revere.
An earlier version of this article appeared in Schmancy in 2017.
