It wasn't that the idea of Pancake Day was strange to me. Heaven knows all of my posts on this blog come back to food eventually. No, what struck me as strange about Pancake Day was the wholesomeness of it. It was something that actually sounded fun. Because I was born with the soul of a seventy-nine year old woman trapped inside me, I'm not the biggest party person, and consequentially, participating in the no-holds-barred bacchanal that is Mardi Gras has never appealed to me.
Pancake Day arose out of the need to get rid of "rich" food items like milk, sugar, and eggs before the more somber season of Lent, which is a time when Christians celebrate Christ's fasting in the wilderness. It is traditional to give something up for Lent. I've personally never done this, but this year, as a challenge to myself, I have decided to give up chocolate. I expect that in two weeks time I will have either given in to stress and gone back to my cocoa mistress, or have murdered my entire flat in cold blood.
I made the Pioneer Woman's recipe for sour cream pancakes. In doing this, I had to wrestle with not only the Metric system, but the English Imperial System of Measurement. A US Customary cup is roughly 236 milliliters, however an English cup is exactly 284 milliliters, this would have been all right had the tablespoons I was able to track down been in proper ratio (an American tablespoon is 1/16 of a cup) but no, they weren't. Luckily, I am not only a culinary but also a mathematical genius, and I was able to make pancakes that were delicious beyond all means. I ate them with golden syrup and shared them with my flatmate Kam.
I had made my pancakes earlier in the evening, my flatmates were going upstairs to cook in their friends' kitchen, and I was expecting a quiet night of catching up on some television and wolfing down chocolate digestives and a Snickers bar before the clock struck midnight. But when I went to the kitchen, I was met with utter madness. Apparently the friends' kitchen was in use and ours was to be the scene for Pancake Day. Eggs were being smashed against the counter, people were whisking with forks and spoons, and pancakes were being poured on all four hobs in the kitchen. And then a fatal mistake was made, someone brought out an electric hand mixer. They needed my help. They just didn't know it yet.
Baking is a delicate process. Too much of one thing or not enough of another, and you might as well go into the corner and cry yourself to sleep. Not that I would know anything about that. I don't even have corners in my kitchen. It's a perfect circle. Perfect, like me. No, I'm not on any medication, why do you ask? But I digress. Using an electric mixer with pancakes would serve to activate the gluten, which would make them not unlike the Hopi bread that you can get at scouting events and various historical reenactments. Things were eventually straightened out. Condiments were lined up as if they were soldiers going off to war. Every plate and utensil was pulled out and distributed and soon the feast was on!
It's strange how one day of celebration can be expressed in such polar opposites. Across the States, people would be drinking and vomiting and revealing their various body parts to each other for beads, but here, we were eating pancakes. And for the first time, it felt like I was really celebrating Mardi Gras, or at least Mardi Gras as I would like it to be.
