Pancake Day - how do you eat yours?

Sounds like madness gone politically correct…

i generally have a little pancake with my butter and real maple syrup.
(aunt gemima what??) :dubious:

(for the non-u.s. dopers, that’s a brand of **really **lame synthetic syrup.)

gee, thanks bunches, you guys. now i gotta go to the grocery store, find the bisquick mix or whatever, dig out my pancake recipe and make the damn things tonight for dinner.

and my diet was going so well…

I ate my pancakes standing up. I was on the serving line at our church’s Shrove Tuesday pancake supper. It’s an Episcopal church in rural Colorado. Fifty years, we’ve been doing this.

Oh, yes, we did have “orange juice” for the pancake-cooking and serving crew. Very, very good “orange juice.” I was raised American Methodist, but I love the Anglicans – we drink!

Were they proper pancakes, or American “pancakes”?
runs

Milk
Maple Syrup
Butter
That’s it.

Come back here, Mister Smarty-Pants!

They were the same pancakes I’ve been eating all my life, except they were really fluffy and about a foot across and soaked up lots of fake maple syrup!

A bit of American perspective (2nd generation English descent, so I’m intrigued & interested): we had pancakes virtually every Sunday after church. But never on Shrove Tuesday, since we’d just had pancakes 2 days before, and how many can you eat in a week, anyway. Always with butter & syrup (usually an imitation maple-flavored syrup, like Log Cabin, or Aunt Jemima. Occasionally boysenberry syrup).

My father (1st gen English) would sing a little song while cooking…

Ash Wednesday, Shrove Tuesday
Poor Jack went to plow
His wife made him pancakes but didn’t know how
She flipped them and tossed them and burnt them so black
She made them so awful she poisoned Poor Jack

They still went ahead with the Shrovetide football game in Ashbourne, Derbyshire this year. This entails hundreds of players pushing and shoving each other, trying to get the ball to one end or the other of the village. No Health and Safety considerations there. There is a good picture of it here

I’m from New Orleans originally and still live in south Louisiana. We have rather an excitable celebration on Shrove Tuesday in these parts with which you may be familiar. The only involvement of pancakes might be as pasties in someone’s edible stripper costume.

I’d never even heard of Pancake Tuesday until a few years ago.

They had police and ambulances there, so I willing to wager that there was a risk assessment done before it went ahead.

I know that the maple tree is, duh, a tree. I know that its common in Canada. I know that the leaf forms part of the national flag of Canada. But somehow, I just didn’t click that you get maple syrup from the Maple tree. The description of tapping the tree and getting sweet sap from it boggled my mind as much as milk in bags.

Milk in bags? The wha???

This blog entry includes a video explaining everything. It’s a bit long, but includes a demonstration of milk bags and their use. We could get milk in bags where I grew up in Michigan, but I’ve never seen it here in Ohio. Apparently it’s common in Canada.

That’s MENTAL!!!

I don’t understand why Americans need milk in gallon quantities when litre cartons suffice for us. Do Americans drink way more milk than other people?

Actually, I believe we do. We also don’t like to go grocery shopping every day…my family of 4 goes through a gallon of milk in 2 or 3 days.

Shopping? For milk?

I have milk delivered every morning in handy recyclable glass pint bottles.

Wow…total childhood flashback, to my youth when we had a milkman drop off a sixpack of glass milk pint bottles. But I think milk delivery stopped in the US sometime in the '60s.

If I had had pancakes, which I did not (my only friends with a kitchen had their pancakes the day before; we had homemade spaghetti sauce with ground steak and zucchini instead), they would have been nearly as thin as crepes, and either rolled up with lemon juice, sugar, and butter, or used as a device to pick up fried eggs. Maybe some of the unidentified jam my Dad’s coworker gave us (I think it’s spiced plum) or a bit of strawberry jam, but probably not. The pancakes would have been made with Bisquik, an egg, and more milk than the recipe calls for, and cooked in a hand-me-down cast iron griddle pan.

Sorry to double post, but I missed the edit window and entirely forgot that I have some golden syrup waiting for me when I get back home. (I wanted to bring it with me back to university, but the jar is too big for a carry on and not something I trust in checked luggage.) I would totally put that on my pancakes, if I had any of either.