By: Daniela Mercades, Contributing Writer
February is a fun and religious month in which there are many celebrations and tasty foods. One of these celebrations, Fat Tuesday—or Mardi Gras, in French—is celebrated 47 days before Easter, the day before Ash Wednesday.
Fat Tuesday refers to the last day of eating delicious food before the leaner, fasting days of Lent begin. Historically, Christians spent the day before Ash Wednesday preparing themselves spiritually and taking part in the Sacrament of Confession. However, people also started to enjoy Fat Tuesday by eating tasty meals, because Christians undertake a sparser or vegan diet during the Lenten season.
One of the oldest Mardi Gras festivals in the United States originated in Mobile, Alabama in the early sixteenth century, when the French organized an event to celebrate Fat Tuesday.
Now, New Orleans in Louisiana is the most famous city to celebrate Mardi Gras. Every year, over a million visitors hit the streets of New Orleans to have fun and watch the numerous parades that are hosted during Mardi Gras Season, which starts about two weeks before Fat Tuesday.
This period before Fat Tuesday, the Carnival season, is characterized by merrymaking, feasting, and dancing. Mardi Gras is the culmination of festivities and oftentimes features parades and masquerades.
One of the most popular desserts eaten during Mardi Gras is the King Cake. It is a sweet roll decorated in symbolic colors of purple—which represents justice, green—representing faith, and gold—representing power. These colors also represent the Three Wise Men who visited the Christ Child on Epiphany. The funniest part of this traditional dessert is that the cake contains a little ‘‘baby’’ inside: whoever gets the slice of cake with the baby in it has to bring the King Cake next time!
Another traditional dessert is the Fat Tuesday Donut, a delicious jelly-filled donut that actually came about as a way to avoid food waste. The Fat Tuesday donuts are actually a Polish dessert called Paczki. Deeply tied to Poland’s Catholic roots, Paczki were created as a way to use up all the available sugar, eggs, butter, and lard in the home before the season of Lent began.
More delicious meals that are popularly eaten during the Mardi Gras season include fried catfish, Cajun shrimp, Louisiana-style ribs, and Cajun-stuffed chicken. Also popular are Beignets—fried treats covered in powdered sugar and made with sugar, eggs, evaporated milk, and flour—and Hush Puppies—small cakes of fried cornmeal dough.
