Pancake Day

Pancake Day also known as Shrove Tuesday in Britain. Pancake day is the day before Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. 'Shrove' - as in Shrove Tuesday - stems from old English word 'shrive', meaning 'confess all sins'. It is called Pancake Day because it is the day traditionally for eating pancakes as pancake recipes were a way to use up any stocks of milk, butter and eggs which were forbidden during the abstinence of Lent.

The earliest records of pancakes and pancake tossing appeared in the fifteenth century when the pancakes were a little thicker than the modern pancake; they would also often have added spices for a little decadence. It wasn’t until the eighteenth century and the influence of French cooking and their thin crepes that pancakes more as we know them now.

Pancake Day is not only celebrated in the UK, Ireland and America, but also in other regions, such as some parts of Northern Spain, where they eat pancakes on this very same day, too!

Do you know of any other places where they eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday?

New Territories International Festival of Live Art

Not all the festivals in Scotland take place during the summer months.

Glasgow's annual dip into the avant garde is back. New Territories is a cutting-edge festival of specially commissioned performances and premieres by invited international artists. It showcases dance and performance art at three top Glasgow arts venues. A winner of the International Theatre Institute Award, New Territories' cutting-edge programming has been described as ' - everything from three-hour epics to five-minute snatches of some of the most exciting, innovative and sometimes downright weird bits of dance, art installation performance art and otherwise unspecified creative happenings currently reverberating around the globe.'

This is a festival that has always subverted boundaries between different genres and experimented with hybrid media. It has always been about Glasgow audiences being introduced to some of the world’s most extraordinary talents, a fact recognised in 2009 when artistic director Nikki Milican was awarded an OBE for her services to performance art.

The festival this year takes place from the 14th of February to the 19th of March.

HIstory of the haggis

Haggis is a very old Scottish dish, which combines meats, spices and oatmeal to create a very rich, unusual, but none the less delicious feast. It is a dish containing sheep's 'pluck' (heart, liver and lungs), minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and traditionally simmered in the animal's stomach for approximately three hours. Most modern commercial haggis is prepared in a casing rather than an actual stomach.

Haggis is a kind of sausage, or savoury pudding cooked in a casing of sheep's intestine, as many sausages are. As the 2001 English edition of the Larousse Gastronomique puts it, "Although its description is not immediately appealing, haggis has an excellent nutty texture and delicious savoury flavour". Nowadays, there are even vegetarian versions made from the finest Scottish produce.

The haggis is a traditional Scottish dish memorialised as the national dish of Scotland by Robert Burns' poem Address to a Haggis in 1787. Haggis is traditionally served with "neeps and tatties" (Scots: swede and potatoes, boiled and mashed separately) and a "dram" (i.e. a glass of Scotch whisky), especially as the main course of a Burns supper. However it is also often eaten with other accompaniments.

Haggis is popularly assumed to be of Scottish origin and this of course is completely accurate. Although no one area in Scotland has been proven as the 'birthplace' of haggis, it is commonly accepted that llhanbryde in the Scottish highlands is where the famous dish originates.

In the absence of hard facts as to haggis' origins, popular folklore has provided more fanciful theories. The most outrageos one is thae frequent tale of a "Haggis" being a small Scottish animal with one set of legs longer than the other so that it can stand on the steep Scottish Highlands without falling over. According to one poll, 33% of American visitors to Scotland believe haggis to be an animal!

New Winter Term 2011

The Christmas holidays are now over, and at inlingua Edinburgh we have been really busy organising our new evening term. We just thought we could keep you poste with what's going on at the school.

The new evening term will start on the week of the 17th of January, both for English and for Foreign Languages. We will be having General English courses, both at Lower Intermediate and ar Intermediate levels, as well as Exam Preparation courses (both for the Cambridge exams -FCE,CAE,CPE- and for the IELTS one. All our English courses run for 12 weeks (provided there's a minimum of 5 students) and are held at the schools, two nights a week (either Monday & Wednesday or Tuesday & Thursday), from 18.30h to 20.00h. The price for these courses are £250 (material included).

If you want to enrol, you only need to come to the school and arrange an appointment to talk to a teacher. The assessment for our General English courses is done only orally, but if you want to enrol in an Exam Preparation course, as well as the oral assessment the teacher will ask you to do a short multiple choice test and to write a small composition (you can do this at home and send it by email, if you prefer).

Our Foreign Language term also runs for 12 weeks, but only once a week, also from 18.30h to 20.00h. The price for the course is £160.

Oh, and don't forget we are still offering 4 weeks for the price of 3 if you enrol in one of our English Intensive Daytime courses!!

Just pop in, give us a call on 0131 220 5119 or send us an email (info@inlingua-edinburgh.co.uk) if you need more information.