Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day)

In the English town of Olney in Buckinghamshire, so the story runs, a housewife in the year 1445 was still frying pancakes when the shriving bell rang to call the parish to confession, and she ran to church frying pan in hand, tossing the pancake as she went. Whether or not the tale is literally true, the Olney pancake race it is said to have inspired has been run, on and off, for centuries, and it captures the strange double character of the day. Shrove Tuesday is at once a solemn preparation for the fast of Lent and a licence for one last indulgence before it — a day of confession that became, across much of the English-speaking world, simply Pancake Day. It falls on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, forty-seven days before Easter, which sends it wandering across February and early March.

Why the Date Moves

Shrove Tuesday has no fixed place in the calendar because it is tethered to Easter, the great movable feast of the Christian year. Easter itself falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, a rule fixed by the Council of Nicaea in 325, so in the Western calendar it can land anywhere from 22 March to 25 April. Lent is the forty-day fast that precedes Easter, beginning on Ash Wednesday, and once the six Sundays within the season are added back in — Sundays traditionally being exempt from fasting — the gap between Ash Wednesday and Easter comes to forty-six days. Shrove Tuesday is the day immediately before Ash Wednesday, forty-seven days before Easter, and so it too moves, arriving as early as 3 February and as late as 9 March.

The day marks the last hours before Lent begins. From Ash Wednesday until Easter, Christians historically gave up rich foods — meat, eggs, milk, butter and fat — and Shrove Tuesday was the moment to eat them up before the fast closed the larder.

Shriving: the Older Meaning

The name has nothing to do with pancakes. “Shrove” is the past tense of the old English verb “to shrive”, meaning to hear a confession and grant absolution. To be shriven was to confess one’s sins to a priest, receive penance and be forgiven, and this was the day’s original and defining purpose. In the medieval church the faithful were expected to make their confession before Lent so as to enter the penitential season with a clean conscience, and the ringing of the “pancake bell” or “shriving bell” summoned parishioners to do exactly that. The custom is old enough that an Anglo-Saxon writer, the abbot Ælfric of Eynsham, described it around the year 1000, instructing that in the week before Lent everyone should go to his confessor and confess his deeds.

The three days leading up to Ash Wednesday were once known collectively as Shrovetide, a season of both spiritual stocktaking and boisterous festivity. The name survives in the English word, but the same days go by different names elsewhere. In French-speaking lands and much of the Catholic world the day is Mardi Gras, “Fat Tuesday”, the culmination of the Carnival season, a word that itself derives from the Latin carne levare, the taking-away of meat. In German it is Fastnacht, the eve of the fast, and in parts of central Europe Fasching. All name the same hinge in the year: the last permitted feast before the long abstinence.

How Pancakes Took Over

The pancake is a practical solution to a religious problem. If eggs, milk and fat were all forbidden through Lent, a household faced the prospect of watching them spoil, and the obvious remedy was to combine flour, eggs, milk and a little fat into a batter and fry it up. Pancakes used the perishables efficiently, and doing so on the eve of the fast became a fixed English custom by the sixteenth century at the latest. The word “pancake” appears in this Shrovetide sense in English texts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and by the time of Shakespeare it was a byword for the day; a character in All’s Well That Ends Well speaks of “a pancake for Shrove Tuesday”.

Different cultures used up their fats and eggs in their own fashion. In Sweden and Finland the day, Fettisdagen, is marked by the semla, a cardamom bun filled with almond paste and cream. In Poland the Thursday before is Tłusty Czwartek, Fat Thursday, when pączki doughnuts are eaten by the million. In Iceland the day is Sprengidagur, “bursting day”, devoted to salted meat and peas. New Orleans turned Mardi Gras into a full-blown carnival of parades and masks, imported from French and Catholic Europe. The English simply fried a pancake — traditionally served with lemon and sugar — and made a game of tossing it.

How It Is Celebrated

In Britain, Ireland and much of the Commonwealth, Pancake Day means, straightforwardly, eating pancakes — the thin, crêpe-like English kind, rolled with sugar and a squeeze of lemon. Around this simple meal cluster older customs of noise and misrule. Pancake races, in which competitors run a course while flipping a pancake in a frying pan, are held in towns across England, the Olney race the most celebrated, said to date back to the fifteenth century and since 1950 run in friendly rivalry with the town of Liberal, Kansas. At Westminster School in London the annual “Pancake Greaze” sees a cook toss a large pancake over a high bar, and pupils scramble for it, the winner rewarded by the Dean.

Shrovetide football, a chaotic mass game played through the streets between whole villages or halves of a town, survives in a handful of English places, most famously the Royal Shrovetide Football of Ashbourne in Derbyshire, where the goals stand three miles apart and the game runs over two days. Similar games cling on at Sedgefield in County Durham, at Alnwick in Northumberland, and at Atherstone in Warwickshire, where a single ball is fought over by hundreds in the main street until a hooter sounds. These riotous street games are among the last living relics of the medieval Shrovetide, when the day before the sober fast was given over to sanctioned rowdiness, and several were nearly stamped out by the Highways Act of 1835, which banned football on public roads and killed off many of the old games for good.

The day once carried darker customs too. In many parts of England and continental Europe, Shrove Tuesday was traditionally a day for “cock-throwing”, a cruel sport in which a tethered rooster was pelted with sticks until killed — a practice condemned and gradually suppressed through the eighteenth century. The bird’s association with the day may partly explain the pancake’s, since both belonged to the general using-up and casting-off before Lent closed in.

Pancake Day and the IHOP Confusion

Shrove Tuesday should not be confused with the American “National Pancake Day”, a marketing creation of the restaurant chain IHOP, first held in 2006, on which the chain gives away free pancakes in exchange for charitable donations. That event is usually pegged to a March date and has no connection to Lent, confession or the Christian calendar; it is a commercial promotion that happens to share a name with the far older religious observance. The genuine Pancake Day is Shrove Tuesday, a movable feast running for many centuries; the IHOP day is a fixed corporate fundraiser with a similar title, and the two are routinely muddled, especially online.

Fun Facts

The Olney pancake race is restricted to women, who traditionally wear an apron and a head covering and must toss their pancake at the start and finish. The Ashbourne Shrovetide football match has no real limit on the number of players and treats the whole town as the pitch, with shops boarded up against the scrum. The largest pancake on record was flipped in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, in 1994, measuring some fifteen metres across and weighing three tonnes. And the word “carnival”, the riotous season that Shrove Tuesday closes, comes from the Latin for “removing meat” — the very abstinence the celebration is a farewell to.

A Closing Reflection

There is something honest about a day that admits human nature so frankly. The medieval church did not pretend people would drift serenely into forty days of self-denial; it built in a valve, a day to confess the past year’s failings and to eat the good things before they were forbidden, and only then to begin the fast. The pancake is the small domestic emblem of that wisdom — a way of wasting nothing while indulging a little. The day’s spiritual half now sits lightly on most who keep it, and for many the frying pan has entirely eclipsed the confessional, but the two belong together. Like Easter Sunday, to which it is calendar-bound, and like the winter feasts of Hanukkah and Epiphany, Shrove Tuesday marks a threshold in the year, and reminds us that people have always understood a fast to be more bearable when it is preceded by a feast.