Shrove Tuesday

Ireland’s Shrove Tuesday celebrations were somewhat more austere than the public masquerades, parades, merriment and feasting associated with, for instance, Mardi Gras in New Orleans or Latin American countries. Ireland’s festivities were primarily held in the home, with family and friends gathered around the fireplace to cook up a feast. Shrovetide also seems to have been a time for telling the future. The following account, taken from Hall’s Ireland and reproduced in Danaher’s The Year in Ireland, gives an insight into a typical Shrove Tuesday in nineteenth and early 20th century Ireland:

Shrove Tuesday Pancakes

Pancakes are traditionaly eaten on Shrove Tuesday. For Catholics, Lent was traditionally a time of fasting and a time when some foods were prohibited; these foods were used up before the begining of lent.

Shrove Tuesday Pancakes

Shrove Tuesday Pancakes

Pancakes are traditionaly eaten on Shrove Tuesday. For Catholics, Lent was traditionally a time of fasting and a time when some foods were prohibited; these foods were used up before the begining of lent.

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The family group - and the “boys and girls” of the neighbours - gather round the fireside; and each in turn tries his or her skill in tossing the pancake. The tossing of the first is always allotted to the eldest unmarried daughter of the host, who performs the task not altogether without trepidation, for much of her “luck” during the year is supposed to depend upon her good or ill success on the occasion. She tosses it, and usually so cleverly as to receive it back again without a ruffle on its surface, on its reverse, in the pan. Congratulations upon her fortune go round, and another makes the effort: perhaps this is a sad mischance; the pancake is either not turned or falls among the turf ashes; the unhappy maiden is then doomed - she can have no chance of marrying for a year at least - while the girl who has been lucky is destined to have her ‘pick of the boys’ as soon as she likes. The cake she has tossed, she is at once called upon to share, and cutting it into as many slices as there are guests, she hands one to each: sometimes the mother’s wedding ring has been slipped into the batter out of which the first cake is made, and the person who receives the slice in which it is contained, is not only to be first married, but is to be doubly lucky in the matter of husband or wife. Men are also permitted to have a chance; and it is a great source of amusement to jog their elbows at the important moment, and so compel them to “toss the cake crooked”.