Pancakes for supper? Yes, please. Carnevale is concluding and today it is Mardi Gras. The day is better known in some places as Shrove Tuesday, and tradition would have us eat pancakes for our supper tonight. That alone is cause for celebration. It is a supper designed to use up the last of the eggs, the last of the butter, the last of all that was restricted in earlier days as we enter the somber season of Lent, which begins tomorrow with Ash Wednesday. Lent back then was much more restrained than it is now, where we pass on meat on Fridays. In earlier times, the restraint was a matter of necessity as much as of observance, for by this time of year, the stocks of food from the harvest were usually quite depleted. If folks were to make it through to the first harvests of spring and summer, a little restraint now was an important thing.
But that is tomorrow. Tonight we eat pancakes for supper and we remember the importance of appreciating each and every day.
Image: “The Pancake Bakery” by Peter Aertsen. Oil on Panel, 1560. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.