Pancake Day is always celebrated on a Tues. and is AKA Shrove Tues. Pancake Day celebrates the beginning of the Christian celebration of Lent where Christians give up something for forty days to sympathise with Jesus Christ when he was sent into the wasteland for forty days and nights and enticed by the Demon. The 40 days now leads up to Easter. Historically Christians would go to church to confession where they might confess their sins and were pardoned from their sins. Over time this has been shortened to Shrove, thus why Pancake Day is now known as Shrove Tues. .
During Lent folks would fast, so that the day before, Shrove Tues. , homes would use up food items in the home like sugar, butter, milk and eggs.
Pancakes were simply made of these ingredients and provided required nutrient elements before the fasting period. Lent starts on Ash Wed. and ends at Easter, a period of 40 days. The first pancake recipe was in a cookery book dated to the year 1439.
The biggest cooked pancake was made to celebrate the Co-operative movement 150the anniversary.
The biggest cooked pancake was fifteen metres in diameter and weighed three tonnes, WOW!
- It was cooked in Rochdale in Britain and was guestimated to contain over 2,000,000 calories, now that would take some time to burn off!
- Ralf Laue from Leipzig tossed a pancake 416 times in 2 mins on the twenty-eight June 1997.
- Runners of marathons are usually trying to think about novel methods to run the race. On the twenty-four October 1999 Mike Cuzzacrea ran a marathon while steadily tossing a pancake in a pan. It took Mike Cuzzacrea 3 hours, 2 mins and twenty-seven seconds to complete the event
Recipes for pancakes can be found here