A poem and a recipe for Samhain.
Samhain
This is the faery time
when old men and old dogs
seek a warm hearth.
The shifting seasons
dislocate space
and time in its endless spool
halts and thins.
Voices from the future
and the past
call like foxes
under an icy moon.
Round the Samhain fire
silhouetted against smoke
and needled by frost
we step through the gate of the year
into the dark time.
Yet in that dim deep silence
where leaves rot and summer
wastes away,
the seed stirs in man
in beast and in the earth
and in that death is life
and from decay springs birth.
L.W.
Penzance Apple Cake
8oz plain flour
4oz butter
8oz currants
1tsp ginger
2oz mixed peel
1tsp cinnamon
2 eggs
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda dissolved in half a cup of milk
2 peeled and thinly sliced dessert apples
Grease an 8 inch cake tin thoroughly. Blits the flour and butter until it is like breadcrumbs then put into a mixing bowl and add the rest of the dry ingredients. Beat the eggs and add them to the mixture and now add the milk and bicarb.
Put half the mixture into the tin and lay on the sliced apple, then add the rest of the mixture. Bake at 150c for about an hour and a half.
I sprinkled the top with fair trade muscovado sugar because I’m pretty sure is an early Victorian Methodist recipe – there is no sugar in it and the Methodists eschewed sugar as a protest against the slave trade.
St Simon and St Jude on you I intrude
By this paring I hold to discover
Without any delay to tell me this day
The first letter of my own true lover.
Trad Rhyme for the Feast of St Simon and St Jude which is the 28th October
