to think that pancakes aren't the best way to use up all your "nice" food?

[stubbornstains]

This has been bugging me greatly for the last couple of days.

So, it's going to be Lent. You are a pre-industrial peasant. Surely, all your poshest, fattest, "nicest" foods at this season are going to be things like: ham, sausage and other bits of pig, cheese (from the floods of milk the cow produces in summer), jam and honey.

As opposed to....er....flour. Yes, milk and eggs, but surely your cows and chickens are going to keep producing these in a steady trickle throughout Lent?

So, why is the traditional Lenten meal not ham with sausages, cheese and more ham, especially given that the most traditional food to give up in Lent is meat? Or, er, ham with jam? Or something....

Cos they'd taste shite with sugar and lemon on

:o

google has your answers

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lent#Pre-Lenten_festivals

I heard the Lenten abstaining from eggs described as a springtime 'truce' between man and birds to enable the birds to raise the next generation.

It makes much more sense if you think of it as a closed season to ensure continued stocks, same as the seasons when you don't eat shellfish or shoot game.

I guess it works for milk as well: you give the animals a few weeks when they can feed their young with their milk rather than stealing it. Sheep have started lambing by Lent, don't know when exactly cows naturally calve though?

Flour sugar and butter are refined foods that you have to buy, and so they're considered luxuries, whereas the meat and vegetables you can grow at home are just everyday things.

I'd have all the things you mention on a pancake. Try My Old Dutch in London.

Wouldn't you be getting to the end of your pig supplies by february? Assuming you slaughtered in mid winter. Ditto cheese from the summer.

Also, would your cow be producing much milk now? I'm no expert but I think without hormones they would have to have had a calf fairly recently. I suppose as a pre industrial peasant you might well have bought your milk and it would have been more expensive at this time of year.

Interesting question! I'm going to be pondering this now.

squeakttoy, I do like the custom it mentions:
"Good Friday it is customary to fast for the day, with no meat, eating only one full meal, and if necessary, two small meals also"

So three meals then... that's quite a fast!

How ver' ver' interesting. I never thought about that! I'm glad I started this thread now; I was dead scared to post in AIBU in case somebody called me a caaaaahh....

In Slovenia they have doughnuts for pancake day.

"During the early Middle Ages, meat, eggs and dairy products were generally forbidden. Thomas Aquinas argued that "they afford greater pleasure as food.... so that from their consumption there results a greater surplus available for seminal matter, which when abundant becomes a great incentive to lust."[13]

(Eyes block of Cathedral City cheddar sternly).

I like the bit about Irish-Americans having a special dispensation to eat corned beef on St. Patrick's Day too (although surely eating corned beef should be considered as a penance in itself?).

I'll hide the cheddar from ds then...he's at 'that age' iykwim.