Monday, 22 February 2021
Wednesday, 17 February 2021
Tuesday, 16 February 2021
PANCAKE DAY - CIVIL COMMOTION from John Taylor's 'Jack A Lent'
Moreover, it is a goodly sight to see how the
cooks in great men's kitchens, do fry in their master's suet, and sweat in her own grease, that if ever a cook be worth the eating it is when Shrove- Tuesday is in town, for he is so stewed and larded, roasted, basted, and almost over-roasted, that a man may eat the rawest bit of him and never take a surfeit. In a word, they are that day extreme choleric, and too hot for any man to meddle with being monarchs of the marrow-bones, marquesses of the mutton, lords high regents of the spit and the kettle, barons of the gridiron, and sole commanders of the frying- pan, and all this hurly-burly, is for no other purpose but to stop the mouth of this land- wheel Shrove- Tuesday. At whose entrance in the morning all the whole kingdom is in quiet, but by that time the clock strikes eleven, which (by the help of a knavish sexton) is commonly before nine, 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 : Then there is a thing called wheaten flour, which the sulphery necromatic cooks do mingle with water, eggs, spice, and other tragical magical enchantments, and then they put it by little and little into a frying-pan of boiling suet, where it makes a confused dismal hissing like the Lernean snakes in the reeds of Acheron, Styx or Phlegethon) until at last by the skill of the cook, it is transformed into the form of a flap-jack, which in our translation is called a pancake, which ominous incantation the ignorant people do devour very greedily (having for the most part well dined before :) but they have no sooner swallowed that sweet candied bait, but straight their wits for- sake them, and they run stark mad, assembling in routs and throngs numberless of ungoverned numbers, with uncivil civil commotions.
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