Pancakes – The Facts!
Shrove Tuesday, also known as Pancake Day, is tomorrow (13th February) Here are some interesting facts for you to ponder over while your eating pancakes.
The idea of eating pancakes on Shrove Tuesday is more than 1,000 years old. Pancakes were originally invented as a way of using up all the leftover fatty and rich foods before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. In total, an unbelievable 52 million eggs are eaten in Britain on Pancake Day. That’s 22 million more than any other day. Over a lifetime, an average person will eat 7,300 eggs.
The most flips anyone has ever done with a pancake is 349 in two minutes. In France, people like to make a wish before flipping their pancakes. They do this while holding a coin in the other hand.
Andrei Smirnov from Russia ate a colossal 73 pancakes in one hour. That’s more than one a minute. On average we consume two pancakes per person on Pancake Day, which means that we get through 117 million pancakes in one day! This requires enough milk to fill more than 93 Olympic swimming pools and almost 13 million kilos of plain flour.
We all have our preferences for pancake toppings but the weirdest pancake toppings have to be sour cream and caviar, ketchup and mustard, peanut butter and ice cream, coco pops and cream, cream cheese and strawberries.
The Guinness World Record for the most pancakes served in eight hours is 34,818. Before baking soda was invented, cooks often used fresh snow as it contained ammonia, which helped the pancakes come out fluffy and soft.
The highest pancake toss reached 329cm high. Good luck trying to beat that!
