Making Pancakes

One of the traditions of small town America is the pancake supper. The idea is simple: advertise a day and a time, make a lot of pancakes and sausage and charge everyone five bucks for all the pancakes and sausage they can eat. It’s an easy fundraiser for churches and civic groups. Whoever thought of it was brilliant.

The church I go to always holds a pancake supper on Shrove Tuesday. As it was explained to me, Shrove Tuesday is the day before Ash Wednesday which is the first day of Lent. You’re supposed to fast during Lent. I guess it’s a Christian version of Ramadan or maybe vice versa. Anyway, the idea is that you pig out on Shrove Tuesday before you start to fast on Ash Wednesday. That’s why Shrove Tuesday is also called Fat Tuesday. It’s also called Pancake Tuesday in some countries because pancakes are traditional Shrove Tuesday fare. Apparently that’s because pancakes are rich in milk, butter and eggs. Hey, I didn’t make this up—I read it on the internet. My assumption is that the pancake custom dates back to an earlier, less affluent time. Maybe even a time before cows were invented. I’ve never considered eating pancakes to be high living. If it were me, I’d make it Steak and Key Lime Pie Tuesday.

The whole subject of Shrove Tuesday pancake dinners is all very complicated actually. I think you have to have a degree in theology to really understand it.

This Shrove Tuesday thing is simpler, easier to understand and a lot more fun in places like New Orleans where they celebrate Shrove Tuesday with parades, booze, beads, bacchanalia, and women baring various parts of their anatomy. Personally, I like that idea better than eating pancakes and sausage but this is the Bible Belt so pancakes it is. (Not to mention the fact that Lent falls in February which is a very cold season in this neck of the woods so the idea of baring any sensitive area of the body is not very practical.)

In my church it’s the men’s group that puts on the Shrove Tuesday pancake supper. It is an opportunity for men who do not know what they are doing to make a mess in the church kitchen.

This year for some reason I was designated as one of the three pancake makers. I’m still trying to decide whether this was an honor or not. I’m not sure why I was picked to make pancakes. I have no pancake-making experience, and there’s nothing on my resume to suggest I would be good at making pancakes. Maybe they thought I handled a case once involving pancakes.

At any rate, I showed up at the appointed time and proceeded to make pancakes. Making pancakes is not that tough—you get the hang of it pretty quickly. The object is to make nice round pancakes. I have to admit that my first three pancakes fell far short of the objective. They resembled a Rorschach ink blot, a pregnant guppy and the outline of the nation of Botswana. But I got better. Which is good because I couldn’t have handled the shame of being demoted to the syrup line. If you’re on the syrup line your job is to make sure the syrup pourers on all the tables are full. It’s a very sticky job.

One of the guys started making Micky Mouse pancakes for the kids. That’s a round pancake with two smaller circles for Mickey’s ears. Not to be outdone I proposed making Minnie Mouse pancakes with two small circles for ears and two small circles for boobs but I was overruled by higher church authority on moral grounds.

I learned that there is yeast in pancake mix. The longer it sits after being mixed the more it rises when you put it on the griddle. There was a long pause after the first initial rush of pancake eaters and so the pancake mix sat for a while. That led to some interesting pancakes. When we started making pancakes again, the small pancakes looked like hockey pucks, and the larger ones came out discus-shaped.

Unfortunately, the church’s pancake supper coincided with an ice storm. It was going well until around 7:30 in the evening. That’s when it was announced that the roads were turning icy. Icy roads are bad news around here, and the room cleared as if someone had announced that an anthrax bomb had gone off in downtown Blue Ridge.

That was okay with me because I was starting to get tired of making pancakes and watching people eat pancakes. Plus the smell of 30 pounds of cooked pork sausage was beginning to nauseate me.

So now I can say that I have participated in the great American tradition of the pancake supper. And that’s all I have to say about that.