Mardi Gras - Apple Fritters from Normandy! BTW Eat up your bacon and sausage!

Mardi Gras--"Fat Tuesday"--is upon us! Lent is about to begin. Lent will get us ready for Easter. Mardi Gras cheers us as we start Lent.

So it's time to eat up your bacon and sausage, and almost time to start fasting and abstaining from meat--and from other favorite foods and drinks. (We'll be discussing all this a good deal in coming weeks.)

So back--briefly!--to Mardi Gras, with its many traditional pancakes and crèpes, its Russian blinis with caviar and sour cream, and, for the French, Apple Fritters. In A Continual Feast, on p. 236, there is a glorious recipe for deep-fried Apple Fritters, from Normandy. (There are other Mardi Gras recipes in the book, as well.)


Let me add a little reminiscence and reflection on these Apple Fritters--and on the power of food in Christian family life. One of our primary purposes as mothers (and fathers and other cooks) is to make the life in our family as fun, as interesting, as meaningful, and as memorable as we possibly can. And food is one of our most powerful tools--our greatest helpers--in this. When my children were away at college, they always tried to get home for Mardi Gras--for those Apple Fritters; they didn't want to miss them! And they would bring a friend or two along with them. They all wanted to be home especially for this ritual meal--and those beautiful, delectable Fritters!

These are the rich opportunities that the Christian year, with its many different moments and seasons, and its powerful messages, gives to us. It is a great gift.

The Battle between Carnival and Lent—it’s on!

We are now fully launched into the season of Carnival. The word "Carnival" means--somewhat surprisingly, perhaps--"the putting away of flesh"; so this is the great mad party before the flesh is put away. Carnival will rise to its climax on February 16—Mardi Gras, meaning "Fat Tuesday"; in English, it's Shrove Tuesday. Carnival will then give way to Lent, with its many austerities; the flesh is indeed to be put away for a time.

In the past, this season was sometimes thought of as a great struggle between the pleasures of the flesh—out of control, and gone somewhat berserk—and Lenten mortification and self-denial. In his famous--and darkly comic--painting titled "The Battle between Carnival and Lent," the great 16th century Flemish painter Peter Brueghel showed the dramatic conflict between the two seasons—the two spirits: love of the flesh vs. self-mortification and charity. Some people are drinking beer, eating waffles, dancing and kissing, many of them masked or wearing party hats--now, that’s Carnival! Others (on the right) are coming out of church, giving charity to beggars, and doing other works of mercy: that’s Lent.

Down toward the bottom, you can see Carnival--shown as a hugely fat man riding a big beer barrel, with a pig’s head on his lance--getting ready to joust with Lent, represented as a skinny old woman dressed in gray mourning, sitting in an uncomfortable prayer chair; her lance is a flat baker’s paddle with two herring lying on it. See the pretzels sitting on her cart? Pretzels--thin ropes of bread in the form of praying arms--were Lenten food.

Here are Carnival and Lent in more detail.





She may not look very tough, but Lent is about to win--for a season!