Lady at the Races
Blog: A Lady in London - 7 November 2009
The Tuesday before the beginning of Lent is a big deal in many cultures. Brazil has parties and parades for Carnival, Louisiana has beads and Bourbon Street for Mardi Gras, and Britain has...well...pancake races for Shrove Tuesday.
When I first learned about the peculiar tradition of Shrove Tuesday pancake races I was a bit disappointed. I was hoping for something more ostensibly festive, or at least less of a hassle on the part of the participants. Why couldn't people just spend the day drinking and dancing instead of slaving over a skillet and running a relay race carrying a giant crepe? Leave it to the English to take an otherwise celebratory holiday and turn it into something less fun. Typical!
Still, I was curious about this pancake racing tradition. I did a little research and talked to a couple of English people to find out the story behind Shrove Tuesday. Apparently the tradition stems from the days when people really took Lent seriously and cleared out their pantries before the season started. That meant getting rid of eggs, flour, and other pancake ingredients. What better way to use them all up than making a huge batch of pancakes and adding whatever else they could find as filler? Legend has it that one woman was so busy making pancakes that when the church bells rang, she ran all the way to mass, frying pan in hand. Thus was born the tradition of Shrove Tuesday pancake races.
I decided that it would be fun to witness this rather zany ritual firsthand. On Tuesday morning I made my way to central London for the The Great Spitalfields Pancake Race. I arrived in time to witness several heats of pancake races, all of which involved young people dressed in outlandish costumes running up and down the street, stopping mid-way to flip their crepes in the air.
Despite my initial pessimism about the British Lenten celebration, the pancake races were actually quite amusing. Typically English, the crowds weren't overly enthusiastic about cheering on their favorite teams and the participants took the event only semi-seriously, but that just made the ritual all the more typically English. Come to think of it, the races were a more fitting pre-Lenten celebration for Britain than a big parade anyway.
When I first learned about the peculiar tradition of Shrove Tuesday pancake races I was a bit disappointed. I was hoping for something more ostensibly festive, or at least less of a hassle on the part of the participants. Why couldn't people just spend the day drinking and dancing instead of slaving over a skillet and running a relay race carrying a giant crepe? Leave it to the English to take an otherwise celebratory holiday and turn it into something less fun. Typical!
Still, I was curious about this pancake racing tradition. I did a little research and talked to a couple of English people to find out the story behind Shrove Tuesday. Apparently the tradition stems from the days when people really took Lent seriously and cleared out their pantries before the season started. That meant getting rid of eggs, flour, and other pancake ingredients. What better way to use them all up than making a huge batch of pancakes and adding whatever else they could find as filler? Legend has it that one woman was so busy making pancakes that when the church bells rang, she ran all the way to mass, frying pan in hand. Thus was born the tradition of Shrove Tuesday pancake races.
I decided that it would be fun to witness this rather zany ritual firsthand. On Tuesday morning I made my way to central London for the The Great Spitalfields Pancake Race. I arrived in time to witness several heats of pancake races, all of which involved young people dressed in outlandish costumes running up and down the street, stopping mid-way to flip their crepes in the air.
Despite my initial pessimism about the British Lenten celebration, the pancake races were actually quite amusing. Typically English, the crowds weren't overly enthusiastic about cheering on their favorite teams and the participants took the event only semi-seriously, but that just made the ritual all the more typically English. Come to think of it, the races were a more fitting pre-Lenten celebration for Britain than a big parade anyway.
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