Shrove Tuesday Pancakes

February. The kitchen is cold at the edges and the windows are dark by five. Shrove Tuesday arrives quietly, the way it always does, somewhere between the last of winter and the first suggestion that it might end. And the whole house smells of butter in a hot pan.

These are not American pancakes. I should say that plainly, because the word means different things on different sides of the Atlantic. These are thin, lacy, slightly crisp at the edges, soft in the middle, rolled up with caster sugar and lemon juice and eaten standing at the counter or passed across the table one at a time, still warm from the pan. They take ten minutes to make and about thirty seconds to eat, which is roughly the right ratio for something this good.

I've made them every Shrove Tuesday for as long as I can remember, and most of the Wednesdays and Thursdays that follow, because once the batter is in your head there's no good reason to stop. The recipe is in the notebook, though I don't need to look at it any more. Flour, eggs, milk, butter. A pinch of salt. A lemon. That's the whole of it.

There are few better feelings than putting a warm plate in front of someone, and a pancake handed over fresh from the pan, sugar already melting into it, is one of the most direct forms of that pleasure I know. Your kitchen, your rules. But lemon and sugar is the classic for a reason, and I'd start there before wandering off into Nutella or golden syrup.