National Pancake Day is when the frying pan comes out and stays out. Mix a batter from whatever is in the fridge, and eat the first one standing at the stove before anyone else notices.
The day is the eve of Lent, and its English name, Shrove Tuesday, comes from shriving, the confession that preceded the fast. The pancake attached itself to the date because the fast that began the next morning once closed the kitchen to eggs and dairy as well as meat. No founder, proclamation or establishing act was located for the American name.
National Pancake Day sits on the last evening before a fast, and the fast is the whole reason for the pancake. Lent once closed the kitchen to eggs, milk and cheese as well as meat, and the church kept a formal way out of it.
Written dispensations to eat dairy were often granted in return for a contribution to some pious work, and the Catholic Encyclopedia records that one steeple of Rouen cathedral was once known for that reason as the Butter Tower. The ban is long gone; the date it created still moves with Easter.
The pancake did the changing, not the day. What went into an English frying pan in the seventeenth century would not be recognised as a stack now.
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The word has nothing to do with food. John Brand's 1813 collection of English customs put it flatly: Shrove-tide "signifies the time of confessing sins, as the Saxon word Shrive, or Shrift, means Confession." The bell that called a parish to be shriven ended up doing a second job.
At York it belonged by custom to the apprentices. Brand reprints a tract of 1690 saying the apprentices, journeymen and other servants "had the liberty to go into the Cathedral, and ring the Pancake-bell", with the minster left open so visitors could climb to the lantern. It was thought a more innocent amusement than the alehouse.
Then Dr. Lake arrived, was "very much scandalized at this custom", and set out to break it against the advice of all his fellow clergy. The tract says the attempt "was very near costing him his life."
What the bell started was not a stack. John Taylor described the batter in 1620 as wheaten flour mingled with water, eggs and spice, then dropped by little and little into a frying pan of boiling suet. No milk on that list, and nothing at all to make it rise.
The lift came two centuries later, from chemistry. The American Chemical Society dates it to the 1830s, when bakers began adding bicarbonate of soda to sour milk and the lactic acid released carbon dioxide into the dough. Sour milk varies, so the rising was unpredictable.
Cream of tartar steadied it in the 1840s at the cost of depending on a grape harvest in France and Italy. Eben Horsford patented a process for a phosphate substitute in 1856 and later added corn starch, so acid and soda could sit in one tin without reacting.
Pearl Milling Company was founded in St. Joseph, Missouri in 1888, and by PepsiCo's own account it originated the self-rising pancake mix later sold as Aunt Jemima. Quaker Oats signed the contract to buy the brand in 1925 and spent decades revising an image its owner says dated back to racial stereotypes.
In June 2020 the company announced it would drop the name and the likeness. The mix returned to the miller's name in 2021, in the same red packaging.
TIMELINE
then there is a bell rung, called the pancake bell, the sound whereof makes thousands of people distracted, and forgetful either of manner or humanity
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WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
The awards are handed out, and then the event closes at a church service.
Liberal, Kansas and Olney, Buckinghamshire have been racing each other since 1950, each community running its own course and comparing times. Runners must wear a traditional apron and scarf and carry a frying pan, flipping the pancake at the start and again at the finish, and the Kansas Historical Society records that the event closes with the presentation of awards and a church service.
This one belongs to the church calendar rather than to a promoter. It is fixed to Easter and drifts across February and March with it, so the square a reader looked it up on last year is not the square it lands on this year.
IHOP Restaurants LLC holds United States trademark registration 4698519 for NATIONAL PANCAKE DAY, filed in April 2014 and registered on 10 March 2015. The registration covers charitable fundraising services, so three words that name a movable date on the church calendar are also a restaurant company's mark.
GOOD TO KNOW
The written permissions to eat dairy through Lent had a German name of their own, Butterbriefe. They were granted in return for a contribution to a pious work, and the Catholic Encyclopedia says several churches are said to have been partly built on the proceeds.
The same day is fettisdagen, the last of three days marking the start of Lent, and the food is a semla rather than a pancake. Nordiska museet notes that the version filled with whipped cream, almond paste and icing sugar only became commonplace in the mid twentieth century, and that the Nordic countries never built a strong carnival tradition, having been Protestant for many hundreds of years.
Olney in Buckinghamshire is the place Kansas runs against, and the Kansas Historical Society dates its tradition to around 1445. The story it repeats is a legend: a woman making pancakes heard the church bells, and ran for the service still carrying her frying pan.
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No. It is an unofficial observance, the Federal Register's document index carries nothing under the name, and no official status turned up in the other indexes checked.
COLOPHON
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