Category Archives: Ash Wednesday

Mar 04 2025
2 Comments
Ash Wednesday, Lent, Shrove Tuesday

A Pancake Supper, and the Entry to Lent

Lent, it seems, has been a long time coming this year. It has, indeed, for most often this movable season of penitence arrives in February and here we are now, well into the first week of March. It’s also, you must admit, if you are an old Democrat like me, been a very long few weeks since the 20th of January. There are those who view Lent as a time of trial and travail, and it has most definitely felt this way in recent weeks for those of us who see the world in a very different way than do the current folks in charge. I’m in for a long four years.

But I’ve never seen Lent in this same dreary way. Yes, we make some sacrifices, if skipping meat on Fridays is to be seen as one. We eat fish on Fridays, or lentils, or pasta fagioli, but none of this feels to me like a sacrifice. I’m very content eating meals like this. And I know people give things up for Lent, but I was not brought up with this tradition. Some of the most important things I’ve ever done in my life have happened during Lent, like the year I brought my grandma, Assunta, to church every night during Lent for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. It was the year after Grandpa died, and it meant the world to Grandma to go every night, and we would stay, she and I, deep into the night in the little chapel, along with other pilgrims in this world. It was lovely. Father Seamus used to talk about “sins of omission,” as opposed to “sins of commission” –– the good things we fail to do, as opposed to the bad things we’ve done –– and his ideas have long resonated with me. I think of Lent as a time to perhaps do things you might not do (like take your grandmother to church every night for 40 nights), and I’m not so concerned about the things I might be missing because of Lent.

Be that as it may, it’s not Lent quite yet. That comes tomorrow, with Ash Wednesday. Today is Shrove Tuesday. It is the final day of the Carnival season that comes between Christmas and Lent each year, and it is a night, traditionally, when pancakes are on the table for supper. This is a tradition I fully support, and Seth & I: we are planning on two kinds of pancakes tonight: regular fluffy buttermilk pancakes for dinner, with bacon, and then later tonight, with our late night tea, Swedish pancakes, which are more like crepes. (There is a debate each year out in the world about which pancakes are the proper ones to eat on Shrove Tuesday; our approach, this year, is to eat both varieties.)

So, why the pancakes on this last night before Lent? Those who think Lent is a big sacrifice nowadays would most likely have been positively suffering through the season in years past. There was a time when the Lenten fast was much stricter. No eggs, no dairy, no meat at all… pancakes for supper on Shrove Tuesday was a ceremonial way of using up the last of the eggs, the last of the milk, the last of the sugar. In parts of Germany, the tradition calls not for pancakes tonight but for doughnuts! There, the night is known as Fasnacht or Faschnacht. And the Swedes: They will be eating semlor today: sweet buns scented with cardamom and filled with almond paste and cream. The day in Sweden is known as Fettisdagen: the same Fat Tuesday idea that gives us another common name for the day: Mardi Gras. The idea is the same, no matter where you are: using up all the remaining lard, sugar, eggs, and butter before Lent begins.

Seth and I, we will eat our pancakes tonight (both the American kind and the Swedish kind) with festivity and in good spirit, and in the morning, if we have it in us, we will approach that altar to have ashes smeared on our foreheads with the spoken reminder: Remember man that thou are dust and to dust you shall return. We are made of the stuff of this earth and we shall return to it. If nothing else, these forty days that follow tonight’s pancake supper will hopefully remind us that life is short, and we would do well to live the time we have with compassion and kindness for our fellow human beings, and to love each day, and, as we like to say here, to live the ceremony of each day, too. These are the things we feel are good and the things we feel are right.

 

COME TO THE SHOP!
Locals: the shop is open Saturdays from 11 AM to 4 PM at 1110 North G Street, Lake Worth Beach, FL 33460. (Do take note, though, that we’ll be closed Saturday March 22 and Saturday March 29.) And we’ve got two special events for you in March. First up, it’s our St. Patrick Market on Saturday & Sunday, March 8 & 9, from 11 AM to 4 PM each day. We’ll be playing Celtic music and featuring our offerings for St. Patrick’s Day and for St. Brigid’s Day and serving my sister’s homemade Irish soda bread and our own Löfbergs Swedish Coffee while you shop. The following week, come back for our San Giuseppe Market on Friday evening, March 14, from 5:30 to 8:30 PM, and on Saturday, March 15, from 11 AM to 4 PM. At this event, we’ll be playing Italian music and featuring our offerings from Italy and serving our Löfbergs Coffee with my sister’s homemade Zeppole di San Giuseppe, the classic Italian pastry that we enjoy once each year to celebrate St. Joseph’s Day. (If you wonder if perhaps my sister, Marietta, is a great baker, you’d be right to think so.) Both events should be great fun. You’ll love what we have in store for you! As for the rest of you, you’ll find all these offerings (minus the soda bread and zeppole, sorry) when you visit our online shop. We appreciate your support! (Click the images below to make them larger.)

 

Image: Annual Pancake Day Dance at Trewern (Wales). Photograph, February 10, 1940, by Geoff Charles. [Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons, The National Library of Wales.]

Feb 13 2024
2 Comments
Ash Wednesday, Carnevale, Lent, Shrove Tuesday, Valentine's Day

Pancakes, Heart & Soul

The Pancake Bakery

It’s a mid-week in mid-February and here come a couple of multi-faceted, multi-ceremonial days. It’s Tuesday today to begin with, and an extraordinary one at that: It is Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Mobile and Key West, and in Venezia, it is Martedi Grasso, and both the French and the Italian translate to Fat Tuesday. This is a movable celebration based on the timing of Lent, which is based on the timing of Easter, which is based on the timing of the full moon that comes with or after the Vernal Equinox. Tonight, the festivity of Carnival concludes. But for most of us, those of us who are far from the cities that celebrate Mardi Gras, tonight is simply a time to eat pancakes or crepes for supper, for the day is also known as Pancake Tuesday, and Shrove Tuesday.

Shrove Tuesday concludes Shrovetide, which is the time we’ve been in for several weeks now: the time after Christmas ends and before Lent begins, and there are many traditional foodways for Shrove Tuesday, even beyond the delectable pancake. Polish bakeries will have pączki today, a rich filled doughnut, and Germans will be making doughnuts, too, for this night they call Fasnacht: this night (nacht) before the fast. And in Sweden and Finland, you’ll find semlor on the table: buns scented with cardamom and filled with almond paste and cream. Our friends at Johan’s Joe, the Swedish coffeehouse in West Palm Beach where Seth and I have been known to buy a semla or two, tell us that originally semlor were made only for Fat Tuesday, or Fettisdagen, but nowadays Swedes bake semlor for all the Tuesdays of Lent. Traditions are living things; they do evolve.

How celebratory for a Tuesday to have pancakes for supper! But no matter if you are eating pancakes tonight, or doughnuts, or semlor, the idea behind all these things is the same. To clear the larder of the things that, traditionally, were not to be consumed during the Lenten fast, and in years past, this was a fairly extensive list (much more so than it is today): no eggs, no meat, no lard, no milk, no cheese, no sugar… no nothin’. And it was not just on Fridays; it was for the full forty days of Lent. When our ancestors fasted for Lent, they really meant it. Lent was forty days of beans and pulses and vegetables and fish and absolutely nothing fun. The Italians certainly understood this. Their traditional symbol for Carnival was a jolly plump fellow called il Carnevale Pazzo: Crazy Carnival. He’s usually seen dancing and playing a mandolin while a necklace of sausages dangles around his neck. But Lent brings la Quaresima Saggia: Wise Lent. She is thin and gaunt and somber. Head cast down, pensive, she is dressed in rags and carries a rope of garlic and dried cod.

It is il Carnevale Pazzo who tucks us into bed tonight on Shrove Tuesday, and in the morning, la Quaresima Saggia is the one who wakes us up, and when she does, we awaken to Ash Wednesday, the first day of our 40-day Lenten journey. Lent these days, it must be said, is no big sacrifice. Some folks give up sweets for Lent, or give up booze, or give up gossiping. All the Church asks is that we be more prayerful and more penitent and give up meat on Fridays. As a kid, for me this meant a season of fish sticks for supper on Fridays, or lentil soup without the sausage. Which was all fine with me. I was the sort of kid who ate anything that was put on my plate, no questions asked. Lucky for me, though, I was born in an age where fish sticks on Fridays met the obligatory sacrifice for Lent, and no one took away my eggs and cheeses and desserts. That would be a real sacrifice.

And then sometimes, like this year, St. Valentine runs headlong into la Quaresima Saggia, and therein lies a dilemma for young lovers who find themselves seated at fancy restaurants for an amorous Valentine’s Day dinner, debating whether they should have the fish or the lentil soup… or the Boeuf Bourguignon cooked to perfection. We may find ourselves sitting there, wondering WWJD (What Would Julia (Child) Do?).

I am not “old” but I am older, and Seth and I have more sense than to dine out on Valentine’s Day. One of our favorite Valentine’s Day celebrations was take out Thai noodles, picnic-style on a blanket on the floor, while we watched A Room with a View on DVD. This year, our niece is coming to dinner and she doesn’t eat meat, anyway. She won’t even realize it’s a ceremonial night of sacrifice when I put a bowl of Pasta Fagioli in front of her. It is an experiment, mind you: She’s not terribly adventurous when it comes to food, and this will be her first encounter ever, I am told, with the mild yet delectable cannellini bean. My hope is she will love cannellini beans and my version of Pasta Fagioli––cavatappi with those creamy white beans, infused with garlic and drizzled with fresh olive oil, seasoned just right with freshly-ground salt and pepper. Where love takes root, we say, let it grow. Especially on Valentine’s Day (and especially one combined with Ash Wednesday).

 

ONLINE SPECIALS: A COPPERMAN’S DAY SPECIAL, PLUS A VALENTINE SALE!
You’ll find our newest Copperman’s Day print and all our Copperman’s Day prints now at our our online catalog when you CLICK HERE. Order 5 or more of any of our mini prints (Copperman’s Day prints, B Mine Valentines, and our famous Keep Lake Worth Quirky prints) and use the code COPPERMAN when you check out; we’ll take $5 off your order to help balance out our flat rate domestic shipping charge of $9.50. (And if you ordered Copperman’s Day prints last week, when we were first announced them, worry not! Your orders should ship out tomorrow.)

If you’re doing more serious shopping (and we do have lots to offer if you are), you may instead use discount code LOVEHANDMADE to save $10 on your $85 purchase, plus get free domestic shipping, too. That’s a total savings of $19.50. Spend less than $85 and our flat rate shipping fee of $9.50 applies. Newest arrivals: Letterpress printed Valentine cards in the Valentine section, and check our Specialty Foods section for some incredibly delicious chocolate we found from Iceland, including a particularly Icelandic blend of milk chocolate and licorice. If you love both these things, well… Icelanders long ago discovered that covering black licorice in milk chocolate, then dusting the result in licorice powder, is just amazing. (Trust me: we’re on our third bag so far.)  CLICK HERE to shop; you know we appreciate your support immensely.

Image: “The Pancake Bakery” by Peter Aertsen. Oil on Panel, 1560. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

Feb 21 2023
Ash Wednesday, Carnevale, Lent, Shrove Tuesday

Carnevale Pazzo & Quaresima Saggia

 

We are firmly on the approach to spring. The Carnevale of Venice, with all its passion and opera and high baroque fashion and masks, began in earnest over two weeks ago. The celebrations come to a close tonight with Martedi Grasso: Fat Tuesday… Mardi Gras. Stateside, the celebrations culminate tonight in New Orleans and in Key West and in Mobile, Alabama, the places where Mardi Gras is an old friend. For most of us Americans, though, the day doesn’t get a second thought as to its specialness, although many of us will be celebrating by making pancakes for supper. Shrove Tuesday is the proper name for this final day before the start of Lent, and we eat pancakes tonight to use up the last of the eggs, the last of the milk, the last of the butter. In Germany, and for the same reasons, it is Faschnacht, or Fasnacht, a night for homemade doughnuts. And in Sweden and Finland, you’ll find semlor on the table: buns scented with cardamom and filled with almond paste and cream. Our friends at Johan’s Joe, the Swedish coffeehouse in West Palm Beach, tell us that originally semlor were made only for Fat Tuesday, or Fettisdagen, but nowadays Swedes bake semlor for all the Tuesdays of Lent. Traditions are living things; they do evolve.

Lent these days is no big sacrifice. Some folks give up sweets for Lent, or give up booze, or give up gossiping. All the Church asks is that we be more prayerful and more penitent and give up meat on Fridays. As a kid, for me this meant a season of fish sticks for supper on Fridays, or lentil soup without the sausage. As a kid who would eat anything put in front of him, I didn’t mind, and Lent never felt like a sacrifice. In ages past, though, this abstinence from meat was not just on Fridays but for all the forty days of Lent, and it was not just meat but also eggs, cheese, milk, and lard. Lent was forty days of beans and pulses and vegetables and fish.

It’s been said, though, that even without this fast enforced by the Church, Lent would have had to have been invented, out of necessity. It was not all that long ago that food was a much more locally produced commodity, and by late winter, food stores would be at their lowest supply. If the populace was going to make it through the winter to the first fresh foods of spring, some abstinence was going to be necessary –– whether by order of the Church or by the simple fact that by late winter, there’s only so much food to go around.

The contrast between the Carnival season and the Lenten season could not be more pronounced. The season of excess typically began with Christmas and its Twelve Days and resumed again with Carnevale (and in some places, where Carnevale would begin right after Epiphany, just continued on without a break). In Italy, the symbol for Carnevale is a plump and jovial fellow, dancing and having a grand old time, well dressed, plume in cap, and often wearing a ring of sausages around his neck. He is called il Carnevale Pazzo: Crazy Carnival. He rules the roost all through the Carnival season and through this culminating night of celebration on Fat Tuesday. Come Wednesday morning, though, there is a distinct shift and a new figure takes center stage: she is la Quaresima Saggia: Wise Lent. She is thin and gaunt and somber. Head cast down, pensive, she is dressed in rags and carries a rope of garlic and dried cod. Her reign begins on Ash Wednesday, and she treads barefoot upon the discarded masks of Carnevale. She is known, too, as la Vecchia: the old woman.

Seth and I, we will eat our pancakes tonight with festivity and in good spirit, and in the morning, if we have it in us, we will approach that altar to have ashes smeared on our foreheads with the spoken reminder: Remember man that thou are dust and to dust you shall return. We are made of the stuff of this earth and we shall return to it. But the stuff of this earth is made of the stuff of the stars, too, and that is something to ponder. If nothing else, these forty days that follow tonight’s pancake supper will hopefully remind us that life is short, and we would do well to live the time we have with compassion and kindness for our fellow human beings, and to love each day, and, as we like to say here, to live the ceremony of each day, too.

 

 

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