Your Daily Facts about Pancakes
Okay, just how many of you are pancake lovers? I love pancakes! It is the breakfast of choice for me, having pancakes and bacon. Or for lunch or dinner. I never turn down a meal that has pancakes.
Plus last year, I actually got to see a machine (simple) that helps one person make like 6 dozen pancakes at a time. Set up over a long and wide grill and all she did was (oh, actually were like 6 people helping on this, as someone had to flip the pancakes over and then put on plates) fill up the container with pancake mix and then just slowly move it down the grill, with it automatically every so often dropping enough batter to make of line of 6 pancakes. Pretty neat and it moved the line of people waiting for pancakes right along.
Pancakes have a long history, dated back to the times of Ancient Romans and it was believed in Medieval times that the first three pancakes cooked were sacred. They were each marked with a cross before being sprinkled with salt and then set aside to ward off evil.
The tradition of eating pancakes on Shrove Tuesday in almost 1000 years old.
On Pancake Day in Newfoundland people place items in the pancake batter before it is cooked to foretell the future for family members. If it happens that boy receives item for a trade, it means he will enter the trade but if a girls receives item from a trade, it means she will marry a person from trade. ?
Pancakes are found almost in every culture. It is a thin flat cake made from batter and fried in a pan or on a griddle. Batter is usually made from eggs, flour, milk or water, oil or melted butter. Sometimes batter can be made from buttermilk.
Maple syrup which is often used as a topping, was originally a sweet drink which was discovered by the Algonquin Indians. To make this drink, sap was collected from Canadian sugar maple trees and next it was boiled.
The first ready-mix food which was sold commercially was Aunt Jemima pancake flour. It was invented in 1889 in St. Joseph, Missouri. It wasn’t very popular at the beginning.
This is a very interesting and funny fact about pancakes: It is common in France to touch the handle of the frying pan and to make a wish while the pancake is turned, holding a coin in one hand.
The first pancake recipe appeared in an English cookbook in the fifteenth century.
Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tuesday is known as ”Carnivale’ in Italy (from the Latin for ‘goodbye to the flesh’)Fasnacht’ in Germany (night of the fast) and ‘Mardi Gras’ (literally ‘Fat Tuesday’) is celebrated in places as diverse as Brazil, New Orleans, and Australia. In Iceland the day is called ‘Sprengidagur’ (bursting day) and is known for the tradition of eating salt, meat and peas. In Greece it is called ‘Apocreas’, which means ‘from the meat’, as it’s traditional for Greeks not to eat meat during Lent.
The first recorded pancake day was in Olney, Buchinghamshire in 1445 year.
The longest race in the quickest time was held in Melbourne in Australia. Man called Jan Stickland covered amazing 345 meters in 59.5 seconds. It was in 1985 year.
The largest number of pancakes tossed in the shortest amount of time in the UK is 349 tosses in 2 minutes. (Dean Gould at Felixstowe, Suffolk, 14 January 1995).
World’s biggest pancake was cooked in Rochdale (Greater Manchester) in 1994, which was 15 metres in diameter, weighted three tonnes and had an estimated two million calories.
Word ‘shrove’ comes from the archaic English verb ‘to shrive’ which means to absolve people from their sins. In the Middle Ages it was very common for priests to hear people’s confessions to prepare them for Lent.
In the US, Pancake Day is commonly known as Mardi Gras. In French ‘Mardi Gras’ means Fat Tuesday.
Celebrity chef Aldo Zilli in 2005 year set the world record for the highest pancake toss at 329cm.
The French crêpe is thin and crispy. It is folded or rolled and heated in a sauce of sugar, butter, citrus juice and liqueur.
Russian blins are usually prepared with buckwheat and they are thin, crispy pancakes served with caviar and sour cream or folded and filled with jam and cream cheese.
One pancake fan ran a marathon while continually tossing a pancake for three hours, two minutes and twenty seven seconds.
In 1986 was held an event called World’s Largest Pancake Breakfast. It was revived for the 350th anniversary of Massachusetts. This breakfast has been held every year since then and hundreds of volunteers help during this event. An amazing number of 71,233 serving of pancakes were served to more than 40 thousand people in 1999.
I am sure the amount of pancakes served above has been beaten more than once since 1999, but I was not successful in my searching for more pancake days, pancake contests, etc.