Pancake Day is the British name for Shrove Tuesday, the day before the start of Lent. Its purpose was practical: to use up the eggs, milk, butter and sugar that would be forbidden during forty days of fasting, and the most efficient way to do that is to make pancakes.
Not American pancakes
This trips up visitors every year. A British pancake is thin — much closer to a French crêpe than to the thick fluffy stack served with syrup and bacon in America. The batter is simply flour, eggs and milk with no raising agent, poured thin and swirled to cover the pan.
The classic topping is nothing more than lemon juice and caster sugar, with the pancake rolled up and eaten with a fork. Golden syrup, Nutella, jam and banana are common variations, and everyone has a firm childhood preference.
Tossing
Flipping the pancake by throwing it up from the pan is the traditional method of turning it, and the traditional cause of pancakes on the ceiling. It is done far more for the ceremony than the necessity, and children are allowed a go on the understanding that something will go wrong.
Shriving
The name comes from shrive, meaning to confess and be absolved. Shrove Tuesday was the day to make confession before Lent began, and in some places a Pancake Bell was rung to call people to church — a bell that, over the centuries, came to be understood as the signal to start cooking instead.
Pancake races
Dozens of towns hold them, and competitors must run a course while carrying a frying pan and flipping a pancake a set number of times.
The oldest and most famous is at Olney in Buckinghamshire, run since 1445. Legend has it that a local woman heard the shriving bell while still cooking and ran to church with the pan still in her hand. The race is restricted to women of the parish, who must wear an apron and headscarf and cover 380 yards.
Since 1950 Olney has competed against Liberal, Kansas, which runs an identical course on the same morning; the times are telephoned across and a joint winner declared. It is one of the more charming small transatlantic traditions in existence.
There is also a race at Westminster in which MPs, peers and political journalists compete, with results that reliably suggest none of them has practised.