Shrove Tuesday

When I was growing up our family always had pancakes for dinner on Shrove Tuesday, the day before the beginning of Lent.

When I started a family of my own, pancakes were a hit and miss thing on Shrove Tuesday. I think pancakes became sporadic because we lived in Pennsylvania Dutch country for quite a few years and were blitzed by the local tradition of eating fasnachts on Shrove Tuesday.

Fasnachts are little balls of greasy deep fried potato flour sometimes served just as their greasy selves and sometimes dipped in sugar. The sugar is a vain attempt to camouflage the grease. I tried both a plain and sugared faschnact once and determined them to be equally horrendous. So far as I could see, their only redeeming value was that I wanted to begin fasting after eating them.

But I have gone astray and need to get back to pancakes. As I consumed my delightful syrup coated cakes at dinner tonight I pondered the relationship between pancakes and Shrove Tuesday. So once dinner was done I headed directly for that wealth of information - Wikepedia - and discovered shrove is the past tense of shrive. The definition of shrive is to seek absolution for one's sins.

Since we good folks have apparently always had a plethora of sins and have always known we weren't going to escape fasting, we learned to load our bellies with rich and filling foods on Shrove Tuesday.

So now I understand the stack of pancakes, the bottle of maple syrup, the bacon, and the hash browns. But faschnats - they will always remain a mystery.