Having just returned from doing a little Sunday lunchtime light shopping (heavens, do you remember when we used to sit down and eat roast beef at this time of day?) I was more dismayed than ever to see how hard the supermarkets are pushing instant pancake batter, egg whisks, bowls, plastic lemons and other pancake paraphernalia.
Now look here. I'm no puritan (unless you count that hour I spent the other night birching myself with twigs for having a slightly impure thought about that bird who used to be in Coronation Street, you know, the blonde one behind the bar - no, not Bet Lynch) but didn't Shrove Tuesday used to be about using up your spare food, not buying more?
Premise number one: The word 'shrove' is a past tense of the Old English verb 'shrive', which means to obtain absolution for one's sins by confessing and doing penance. Shrove Tuesday gets its name from the shriving (confession) that Anglo-Saxon Christians were expected to receive immediately before Lent, a period of abstinence placed halfway between Christmas and Easter to counterbalance the excesses of the aforementioned festivals.
The modern purpose of Shrove Tuesday, however, seems to be more about no more than providing a handy stopgap for high-flying marketing bods who need to hijack another traditional Christian festival in order to boost their profits between those other traditional commercial feasts of St. Valentine's Day and Mother's Day.
Premise number two: The traditional reason for eating pancakes on Shrove Tuesday was to use up eggs, milk, sugar and flour immediately prior to the commencement of the fast.
I had to queue for bloody ages in the shops today, because half the world, it seems, was hellbent on systematically emptying the shelves of eggs, milk, sugar and flour, and worse still, instant batter mix (!) in anticipation of Tuesday's forthcoming frivolities. Anyone would have thought war had just been declared.
So this coming Tuesday, while half the world starves, the wealthier half will follow an already oversized meal with a dessert comprising fried discs of batter made from the spoils of their day's hunting in the supermarkets. More pancakes will almost certainly be made than consumed.
Here's one for the older readers. Remember "lemons"? You know, that yellow fruit whose juice was squeezed over the cooked "Pan Cakes". Lemons were (and still are) inexpensive and widely available from "greengrocers", a subgenre of friendly independent traders called "shopkeepers" who used to occupy that Tesco Metro at the end of your road. (You know, the ones doing 'buy one get one free' on plastic lemons.)
(Incidentally, the brand of plastic lemons associated with Pancake Day are manufactured by the same firm who make Domestos, Vaseline and OMO washing powder, which I honestly didn't think had been in the shops since the late 1960s.)
Plastic lemons are not biodegradeable. Don't buy them. Real ones are perfectly environmentally-friendly, and they don't contain nasty artificial preservatives such as sodium metabisulphite either. (As an additive, sodium metabisulphite may cause allergic reactions, particularly skin irritation, gastric irritation and asthma. It is not recommended for consumption by children.)
Real lemons have a myriad of other uses, such as being an efficient all-round cleaning agent. A selection of these can be found here.
Suddenly, I really don't fancy pancakes.
Here endeth today's lesson.
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