Flipping ridiculous: Pancake Day was better before Instagram influencers

There was a time – and I realise this makes me sound like a man polishing his model Spitfire in a shed – when Pancake Day meant one thing: a thin, faintly rubbery crêpe, blistered in patches, squeezed with lemon, buried under a landslide of granulated sugar, eaten too quickly and slightly resentfully at the kitchen counter while your mum swore at the smoke alarm.

Traditionally, the whole point was to use up eggs, milk and fat before Lent – the last blast before 40 days of self-denial. The religious element has long since disappeared for most of us who grew up in the 2000s, but it retained an undercurrent of theological housekeeping.

The word “shrove” comes from “to shrive”: to confess. Medieval Christians would be shriven of their sins before fasting – cleared out spiritually before being cleared out gastronomically – and somewhere along the way we decided that confession pairs nicely with batter. This was a ritual born not of indulgence but of restraint: a final sweep of the larder before a season of going without.

In schools, that ritual bordered on punitive. A dinner lady with the wrist strength of a longshoreman would ladle out batter at industrial speed. The pancakes arrived beige and freckled, normally undercooked in the centre. You’d queue with a plastic tray and watch as she squeezed a tired lemon over them, scattering sugar like confetti at a wedding no one wanted to attend.

And yet, like everything else that once existed happily below the waterline of content, Pancake Day has been dragged, blinking, into algorithmic, sugar-drenched spectacle. The thin British pancake – or, let’s be honest, our butchered attempt at a crêpe – has been replaced by puffy American stacks designed less for eating than for filming: syrup cascades captured in slow motion, interiors torn open for “stretch porn”. Instagram Reels throb with cross-sections – molten Biscoff, rivers of pistachio cream, slabs of “Dubai chocolate” stuffed into batter – as though Shrove Tuesday were a franchised dessert concept rather than a church-calendar footnote.

The irony is almost admirable: a ritual born of abstinence has become an arms race of UPF-fattened excess. Google searches for “pancake toppings” spike each year, dessert-spread sales climb and influencers offer “five ways to elevate your Shrove Tuesday”, as though what the medieval Church Fathers truly lacked was a pistachio drizzle.

I am not anti-innovation, nor do I believe culture should be embalmed in Church of England–sanctioned lemon juice. But I do feel strangely protective of Pancake Day. It used to be the least competitive moment in the food calendar.

Christmas groans under expectation; Easter has been annexed by marketing departments; even Bonfire Night now arrives with artisanal marshmallows and small-batch toffee apples. Pancake Day, by contrast, was joyfully incompetent. The first one was always a disaster; the last always burnt. The sugar dissolved into the lemon juice, forming a gritty sludge that soaked through the fold. It was cheap and chaotic – a universal leveller of sticky-fingered children before school.

What has shifted is not simply the topping but the cultural temperature around it. We have moved from a domestic food culture that tolerated imperfection, thrift and mild disappointment to one that demands spectacle, optimisation and shareability; from rituals that marked time quietly to “moments” engineered for engagement. The rise of the smartphone has collapsed the distance between cooking and broadcasting, so even the most minor traditions now audition for relevance, their value measured less in taste or memory than in views, saves and reposts.

In an age where even our casual domestic rituals are curated, lit, filtered and judged, there was something pleasingly archaic about a food tradition that required so little of us.

So forgive me if, this year, I reach for the slightly shrivelled lemon at the back of the fridge and the ordinary bag of sugar; if I make my pancakes thin and uneven and set off the smoke alarm for old time’s sake.