Pancake Day and the Happiness of Custard

,,,,and other good things before the forty days of Lent

Just when Dry January is done and dusted - not me, why would you give yourself a hard time just as when it’s the most gloomy time of the year? - comes Shrove Tuesday aka Pancake Day aka the last day of Carnival. Which means eating up everything good in the larder - eggs, cream, sugar, chocolate - before it’s all over until Easter. Forty days of abstince does a person good, in spite of the weather and politics and all the things no one - me and possibly you - wants to discuss with anyone, including their best friend.

I learned something about the underpinnings of the Lenten fast when my children attended une annee scolaire at the CES (middle school) in Castelnaudary in the Languedoc. I know, I know, I thought it’d be good for the four - born in quick succession when I was still in my twenties in the 1960’s - to acquire a working knowledge of French as well as Spanish. Spanish had come easily to the four as a result of their mother’s unilatertal decision as a know-nothing twenty-something educated as a UK diplomat’s stepdaugther in Latin America - to remove the entire family from the land of their birth to spend their early years among the Latins, where small children are loved and admired and fed free strawberries in the market-place.

And no - I didn’t consult their father, husband Nicholas, since he was busy doing other things such as running Private Eye. And anyway, since Nicholas earned his living as a writer, it didn’t seem to me that it really mattered where we lived. Which led to a school year in the Languedoc, sometime stronghold of the Cathar religion - dualist, seeing the world as the province of the devil, very unpopular with the Pope in Rome since it allowed women to assume the duties of priest (imagine that in the 13th century!). Memories of non-conformist Cathars, outlawed since the fourteenth century (Simon de Montfort has much to answer for) might have had something to do with the enthusiastically pagan celebration of Shrove Tuesday expressed as Carnival (lack of meat), an excuse to dress up and behave badly (as in Saturnalia) without have to suffer the consequences. You catch the general drift. Unaccountability is key.

Shrove Tuesday is a national holiday - a day when children don’t have to go to school and grownups stay in bed. The children, including the five-year-old, disappeared very early in the morning with friends from the village, returning well after sunset and refusing to tell me what they’d done and where they’d been. It was several years before they ‘fessed up. True to the spirit of Carnival, they’d all gone round the farmhouses pinching supplies from unattended larders (including mine).

Thieving, it seemed, was essential to the proper conduct of the celebration. Provided with provisions and avoiding adults, they sneaked off to an empty barn in the woods to cook up a gigantic omelette with wild greens, potatoes and onions in a huge iron pan that had been hidden ahead of time. Bad behaviour takes forethought. After the omelette had been torn up and eaten with the fingers (no plates, knives or forks permitted), games ensued. What games? Games of the kind that happen when young people get together without supervision. And that was as much as they were prepared to explain.

Shrove Tuesday omelette

This is really a thick egg-pancake cooked up with bacon fortified with potato and onion, though the latter can be omitted if unobtainable (without permission) from the larder. Start as you mean to go on.

Serves 4-6

About 4 oz slab bacon, diced

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

2-3 cooked potatoes (about 1lb), diced

1 large mild onion, finely sliced

8 large eggs

Salt and pepper

In a roomy frying pan (skillet) fry the bacon gently till the fat runs. Add the butter and onions and fry until soft and golden but not browned. Add the diced potato and let it feel the heat. Fork the eggs together to blend. When the potatoes are ready, pour the egg over and around them. Stir over a gentle heat till most of the egg is set, then stop stirring and let the omelette brown a little on the base. Serve without turning it out, in the pan in which it was cooked, and eat with your fingers. The rest is up to you.

p.s. more stories and b&w’s in Family Life: Birth, Death and the Whole Damn Thing.

p.p.s. Beloved paid subscribers will shortly be in receipt of a trio of egg-related recipes just in time for the party.