From Shrovetide to Brose Night

via Collop Monday, Nickanan Night, Scallop Potatoes & Pancakes

Dearest Gentle Reader,

This week our letter is going to be a little different, as this is such an interesting time for food folklore. So we have no story as such except for those behind some ritual foods, and no remedy unless you count eating pancakes as being in some way healing. There are recipes galore though, and paintings and quotes; as well as food history and folklore, some I which I think will be new to some of you. Some of it was even new to me.

Shall we start with some definitions? Shrovetide is a lovely word and it means the period between the ninth Sunday before Easter until Lent begins with Ash Wednesday. It changes every year because Easter is a moveable feast. I won’t explain why, it doesn’t really impact us in this letter and the info is fairly easily available if people are interested. Anyway Shrovetide comes from the the word shrive which means to shed yourself of your sins. The idea was to go into Lent as pure as possible and then contemplate the state of your soul whilst fasting. Some devout Christians lived on bread and water throughout Lent although at this time of year there wasn’t too much exciting food for the majority of the population to be tempted by.

Lent used to mean abstaining from meat, dairy and eggs for six weeks (fish was still allowed) and only eating one meal a day in the evening. It did change gradually over time with the meal moving to lunch time and Henry VIII made it allowable to have dairy but it was still very miserable which may have been partly why sales of alcohol increased as it wasn’t forbidden. Another reason was that beer is actually jam packed with energy so it was another way of getting more calories in the form of drink. Observation of Lent as a period of religious penance has decreased as time moved towards the present day with modern anglicans perhaps picking a luxury to give up rather than taking part in the full fast.

You can see though how it would have been important to have one last meal which had richer foods both to give you something to remember during the fast and to use up all the ingredients before it started. You probably think I’m going straight for Pancake Day but I’m not. I’m going to look at Monday first before that all important Shrove Tuesday and its pancake deliciousness. Monday was both Collop Monday and Peasen Monday depending on where you were in the country. Peasen Monday is from Cornwall specifically and people from the county used up bacon but had it with dried pea soup instead of fried eggs. I’m not sure why, maybe they were saving them for pancakes the next day.

Peasen Monday is different to Collop Monday for many reasons but a major one was that it also had an air of mischief night. Some texts suggest this was quite dark with youths going about the street with pottery shards, threatening people make them pancakes the next day, otherwise the shards would be thrown to damage houses.

Others on a much lighter note, suggest that it was a night of practical jokes with children promising no more mischief if pancake were promised for the next day. Hobby Horses and scary straw figures also played a part with burning straw figures ending up in the sea. The folk horror potential is simply endless, if you’d like to know more about the mischief side you should look into Nickanan Night.

Collop Monday does seem to have come from the northern counties around Yorkshire. Collops were slices of meat, which in this context, would have been thick slices of ham or bacon which would have been cooked with eggs to help use them up before Lent. The first recorded use of the word in 1362 meant both the bacon/ham and the fried eggs but by 1542 the developed to just mean the bacon. The fat from the bacon or ham would have been used the next day to fry the pancakes. The poor would have been unlikely to have had collops in the first place but there is some suggestion that children were sent begging house to house to collect collops from more comfortably established neighbours.

On a slight tangent, m there is no evidence that collop is the same as an escalope but you can guess they might be related. It’s very possible that neither the collop or Escalope have any connection to the famous fish & chip shop speciality from the Midlands known as a Potato Scallop. This delicious item is a slice of potato, dipped in batter and then deep fried and under that name is very much a local delicacy. So local in fact that there is a very cool blog post on the site Paradise Circus that suggests that the proposed West Midlands Combined Authority should only cover the area defined by the question ‘where do you get potato in batter if you ask for scallops at the chippy?” The author Howard Wilkinson suggested this should be known as the Scallop Line. He even has evidence to back it up, well a google doc anyway. You can find the original article here: Scallop Line

So on the Monday before Lent you can have a starter of pea soup, follow it with bacon and eggs and with a little licence, potato scallops or any preferred combination to fit your dietary requirements and claim that you are doing it for tradition. Nothing to do with enjoying crispy fried things, nothing at all, it’s practically a penance. No-one will believe you, but it will be a useful practice for claiming similar things when you have eaten your own weight in pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. My oversized kitten, well cat now, once stole and ate an entire pack of Whiskas Temptations Chicken & Cheese treats and fell asleep on his back on the sofa with his swollen belly fully on show. He was extremely full and extremely content. I suspect that is how many people will feel when they have pushed in their last pancake tomorrow.

Pancake Day only got this name in the early 19th Century but the practice was clearly established much earlier, it just took longer for the name to take the place of the more Christianity aligned Shrove Tuesday. It was traditional all over Europe to celebrate this day with an excess of indulgence but England, Ireland and Scotland don’t seem to have done this to any great degree although there is a lot of folklore around the various sports that took place on this date particularly street football and the excesses which attached to it. I’m not a big fan of football so I suggest you search for Ashbourne Shrovetide football to get a flavour of it. My Dad once went to a similar Good Friday event in Workington but said he probably wouldn’t repeat it and he actually likes football, so I don’t think there is much in common with the modern game.

Pieter Aertsen — The Pancake Bakery 1560

I do appreciate that I seem to be giving you homework today and I promise I didn’t mean to. I will not make you go any further than my nonsense until we reach the end of today’s letter. Let’s get back to the important things: pancakes. Shrove Tuesday is the last day before Lent and so, as they did with collops, people needed a dish to use up those rich ingredients they couldn’t eat for the next six weeks. That’s the suggestion anyway. I’m not going to argue.

Pancakes have a long history. That is if you consider them as a batter that gets put onto a hot surface to cook, rather than something that has to be rolled out like a flatbread. The Romans had them and other cultures across the world but if you are looking for something similar to what most of the UK will be eating on Shrove Tuesday then the The Good Huswifes Jewell of 1585 has the possible first recipe in English for a proper pancake, perhaps the first in print anywhere although plagiarism was rife in cookbooks at the time. Here it is anyway:

Gervase Markham had a much less rich recipe, preferring a lighter, crisper version in his book The English Housewife of 1651:

But if you wanted something sensational in the pancake line then you should look no further than the Accomplished Cook, Robert May in 1660 who had what we might call a very fancy version plus some less special and more everyday recipes:

There is even a ladies pancake race in Olney in Buckinghamshire on Shrove Tuesday where you have to flip the pancakes as you run which has been running year since 1445 with only a short lapse during WW11. No-one can confirm the origin of the race: One tale tells of a stressed out housewife who heard the Church bells and dashed off to attend with her frying pan and pancake in tow – and this remains the most popular of the origin stories for the tradition. Another tale suggests that giving pancakes was a bribe to get the Ringer, or Sexton, to ring the bell earlier to start the day’s festivities – as it used to be a half-day holiday.

Pancakes weren’t just for special occasions or races. They were a great way to bulk out food and they could be made savoury or sweet. W Ellis in the Country Housewife;s Family Companion has nearly a chapter full of ideas in 1750. They are still a big deal on Pancake Day here, even though the idea of giving up things has decreased dramatically and people often insist they will make them more. The make an amazing alternative to dishes that normally contain baked pasta especially if you make them nice and thin. The British pancake is like a slightly thicker crepe so its perfect for filling like cannelloni or layering like lasagne.

You can tell they are a big deal in most of Europe judging by the art and literature they are involved in. I have included several glorious paintings below for your perusal.

Pancakes Pieter Aertsen — The Pancake Bakery 1560 Willem van Mieris - The Pancake Woman 1710-19 Jan van Bijlert - A Woman Holding Pancakes Adriaan de Lelie - Woman Baking Pancakes c. 1790 - c. 1810 David Monies The Treat (1812-1894) David Teniers the Younger - The Pancake Baker

They crop up in literature as early as c.500 BC when the Greek poet Cratinus wrote about tiganites, ‘a pancake hot and shredding morning dew’. I think I prefer Christina Rossetti myself:

Mix a pancake,

Stir a pancake,

Pop it in the pan;

Fry the pancake;

Toss the pancake,

Catch it if you can.

Or maybe we should defer to the great Julia Child who said: Everything can have drama if it's done right. Even a pancake. I think we should give the author of The Moomins the last fictional word on this

“Someone who eats pancakes and jam can't be so awfully dangerous. You can talk to him”. - Tove Jansson.

The best pancake divination comes from Scotland where Shrove Tuesday has and had had different names: Fastern’s Eve, also called Brose Day or Bannock Tuesday. Families gather round the fire for fresh bannocks to come off the griddle but towards the end of the batter one large bannock would be made and charms would be dropped in the last of the liquid batter. Whoever was in charge of baking the pancake had to do it in absolute silence, and everyone else present would do everything the could to make the baker break their silence. If they did, someone else would take over the baking, and so on. The pancake would then be broken into pieces and placed in the pocket of the baker’s apron. The baker was then blindfolded and would pick out a piece of the pancake and would cry out, ‘Wha owns this?’ until someone claimed it. Depending on what charm you received in your piece of bannock indicate what kind of person the recipient would end up marrying - a halfpenny meant a bachelor; a farthing, a widower; a button, a tailor; a piece of straw, a farmer; a nail, a blacksmith.

The very last of the batter would then be mixed with soot to make a very special bannock known as a Dreaming Bannock or sooty bannock, this was made right at the end of the evening. It was supposed to be made in absolute silence, and then a little bit was eaten before the rest was placed under the pillow in a sock. No drink could be drunk once the piece of bannock was received (the ensuing thirst presumably made vivid dreams more likely), and the person was supposed to dream of their future spouse.

As well as divination in pancake form, Brose was very important on this night. Brose was a thick, savoury broth eaten throughout the year made with oatmeal, good beef stock, beef fat and salt but especially on this day owing to its divination properties. Beef would have been hard to come by for some, but farmers made a point of eating it because there was a belief that their cattle wouldn’t thrive if they didn’t. A wedding ring, a button and a coin would be dropped into the brose and young people would thrust their spoons into the thick liquid in the hope of finding the ring. A button signified single life until at least next Bannock Night, the ring signified marriage and coin would mean wealth the following year. The ring however was slightly more complicated: If you got the ring, you didn’t say anything till everyone had finished eating. You’d then wear the ring overnight, then give it back to whomever it actually belonged to in order for the wedding to stick. There is also some talk of fortunetelling with eggs on this night which would be amazing but sadly I couldn’t find any sources for it except one newspaper.

Shrove Tuesday definitely used to be a lot more fun in the rest of the UK too and as well as the pancakes there was much more revelry similar to that around the Lords of Misrule and 12th Night. There was a very long rhyming poem written by Naogeorgus (A Protestant Reformer) which highlights the excesses of feasts of pork and puddings, games, heavy drinking and gambling with cards and dice, running round the streets naked (which must have been chilly in February).

He is clearly disgusted by the amount of dressing up as animals and playing in the street as well as cross dressing. He in particular refers to ‘wanton wenches drest like men’ which I think might be an excellent team name for any sport or any pub quiz when I come to think about it. Pancakes are also mentioned.

There are also a few non pancake related items of folklore for Pancake Day or Shrove Tuesday which I should probably mention: One: that you should use this day to sow onion seeds on this day so that they grow very big. Two: you should sow parsley and lettuce seed on this day to ensure their greenness. The third one is weather related: thunder on Shrove Tuesday indicates storms to come and plenty ahead in the harvest, sunshine means there will be sun on every day in Lent. Wind on the same night however indicates a death amongst learned people and the death of much fish the following summer. No, I don’t know about that last one either, it suggests further questions at the very least.

I suppose all that’s left now is to provide you with a pancake recipe and I’m going to link you to my favourite recipe since 2018 (previously I used one from the BBC Good Food website). The one I use now is this one from the wonderful Olivia Potts (Instagram) which is perfect to make on Pancake Day and squeeze over lemon juice, sprinkle with lemon juice and roll up and eat standing over the cooker, making the next one. Sadly the original link no longer works so I’ve had to link to the web archive version: https://web.archive.org/web/20180209185121/https://life.spectator.co.uk/2018/02/recipe-perfect-pancakes/.

So with that, my wonderful ones, I must bring this letter to a close. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch via the comments or via any of my social media profiles/my website . If you have enjoyed this and would like to read further such nonsense and have not yet subscribed, please don’t hesitate to subscribe for free at the button below. You’d be very welcome and it would be a joy to write to you.