What is there not to love about a day when it is acceptable to eat pancakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner?
Whether you enjoy your pancake on its own or with copious amounts of creative toppings, Pancake Day tends to get the majority of us south west Londoners pretty excited.
To celebrate, we have taken a look at some of the most surprising pancake facts in celebration of this flippin’ fantastic age-old tradition (some will make your jaw drop to the flour!)
- The world’s largest pancake ever made was in Rochdale in 1994 and measured a whopping 15 metres in length, weighed three tonnes and contained an eye-watering two million calories! A gargantuan frying pun, I mean pan, must have been used!
- The record set for the most amount of pancake tosses in Britain was 349 in two minutes – what a tosser!
- The first recorded pancake race was in 1445 in Olney, Buckinghamshire. Legend has it that in 1445 an Olney housewife was so busy making pancakes she lost track of time. When she heard the church bells ringing for mass, she ran to the church in her apron, still holding her pan and pancake. Olney still has a pancake race every year.
- It is estimated that us Brits use an astonishing 52 million eggs cometh Pancake Day, which is 22 million more than on a normal day – eggstortionate!
- The longest pancake race in the shortest time was held in 1985 in Melbourne, Australia. Jan Stickland covered an impressive 384m in 59.5 seconds.
- Pancake enthusiast, Mike Cuzzacrea, ran a marathon while continually tossing a pancake for three hours, two minutes and 27 seconds.
- Andrei Smirnov of Russia, holds the unofficial record for eating the most pancakes, wolfing down 73 in just one hour.
- Over a lifetime, an average person will eat 7,300 eggs.
- As You Like It and All’s Well That Ends Well are the only Shakespeare plays that mention pancakes.
- The world’s priciest pancake costs £800 at Manchester restaurant Opus and is layered with lobster, caviar and truffles, and topped with Dom Perignon Rose hollandaise sauce – rather eggstravagant if you ask me!
Picture courtesy of hedvigs, with thanks
