Pancake day; how do you top yours?

So an extra mini-post this week, just because my normal late-in-the-second-day-of-my-fast obsessing about what I’m going to eat tomorrow is particularly focused today, because it is Shrove Tuesday tomorrow.

I think the British Shrove Tuesday tradition says something profound about us. In Brazil there are the enormous samba parades, in New Orleans the parades with the costumes and the music and the beads, in German and Holland they have fancy dress and decorated floats, in Venice fancy dress and masked balls etc, etc… and all of these traditions are accompanied by drinking, a sense of licentiousness and general merry making. In the UK we make pancakes.

Nope, we don’t also have a tradition of holding heavily alcoholic pancake parties, or eating the pancakes off each others naked bodies, we just make pancakes. Normally for tea (I’m not sure pancakes can be described as dinner), and we generally eat them with lemon and sugar, which is frankly the most boring topping that our continental cousins offer at any time, let alone during the last hooray before Lent starts.

I haven’t figured out yet what this says about us but it’s probably the same thing Bill Bryson identified when he talked about British people looking at a digestive biscuit (undoubtedly the biscuity cousin to a lemon and sugar pancake topping)and going “Oooh, lovely”.

In any case I must be terribly British, as, particularly in my fasted-state, I’m supper excited about a pancake supper tomorrow. Despite my disparagement above, I really like sugar and lemon, but I am going to do something a bit more exciting this year and after much thought the pancake toppings tomorrow will be:

• Shredded rotisserie chicken and Philadelphia
• Crispy bacon and maple syrup
• Dulce de leche and banana (thankfully I made an extra can of dulce de leche when I attempted a s’mores cake late last year)

I have counted the calories and reckon that these toppings add up to 500 calories before you factor in the pancakes (British style 250 for three or four). But I can at least console myself that it’s less calorific than beignets and daiquiris orqueijo coalhos and caipirinhas :-)