Welcome to Feasts and Festivals. You'll notice if you've visited before that most of the posts on the blog have been removed. That's because I have migrated my writing to Substack. If you go into Substack and search for Feasts and Festivals, you'll find me there.

Liz

The Twelve Days of Christmas

'One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.'


From: A Child's Christmas in Wales' by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

I thought I'd make a list of seasonal posts from the blog archive. Here they are for you to choose from.

A very Happy Christmas to all.

Normal service will be resumed next Sunday.

You might like to know that 'Cornish Feasts and Fest­ivals' has just won the Best Local Cuisine book for the UK in the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2013. They are the Oscars of food and drink books!

Well I never.

xxLiz


23 December: Tom Bawcock's Eve

25 December: Yule

31 December: Wassail!

A Good Old Home Christmas



'Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. 

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.' 

ibid

10,11,12 May Beating the Bounds on Rogation Days

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive at where we started

And know the place for the first time.

From ‘Little Gidding’ by T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

The origins of this Church practice are very ancient and definitely non-Christian. The word ‘rogation’ comes from the Latin ‘to ask’ and the practice on Rogation Days was to ask for a blessing on the growing crops. Professor Ronald Hutton in ‘Stations of the Sun’ believes Rogation developed from the Roman practice of ‘Ambarvalia’ which may have been practiced during the Roman occupation of Britain and which is exactly the same – priest and people processing round the fields of a given area, praying for a good harvest.

The processions had a practical use in a time before maps, because they reinforced the boundaries of a parish and the agricultural holdings within it, in the community consciousness. ‘Beating the Bounds’ as it came to be known, is mentioned by Alfred the Great and by Athelstan, but by the reformation the practice had become a target of official opprobrium because of the raucous behaviour which supposedly accompanied it. These boundary walks were also known as ‘gang days’ from the Anglo Saxon word ‘gangen’- to go.

What is unusual and strange though is the practice of beating not only the boundaries and markers, but also beating the young boys in the procession! They were sometimes whipped with willow branches or deliberately bumped against the boundary stones or trees which marked the way. This was supposedly to imprint the boundary on their young minds. I have an image of a rather nasty church warden beating up the local youth as a punishment for sins not yet committed, so I hope the beatings were notional rather than real.

"Beating the Borough Bounds" at Alverton Penzance - oil painting by J T Blight, 1853

Rogation Days were also ‘grass days’ – i.e. fasting days when no meat or fish could be eaten and the parish walks would end with a feast of ‘gang ale’ and Rammalation biscuits or cakes. I love the idea of a Rammalation feast – the name has to be a rural corruption of ‘perambulation’. Gang ale signifies not a particular type of ale but one made for the occasion of the ‘gangin’. Rammalation biscuits or cakes however are mysterious. They certainly existed, but in all of my hundreds of recipe books and the vastness of cyber space, receipt there is none. So I’ll just have to invent one. It may be of course, like the ale, Rammalation cakes were nothing special, just any cake presented for the occasion. There is a clue however in this extract from an old will.

‘At Leighton Buzzard on Rogation Monday, in accordance with the will of Edward Wilkes, a London merchant who died in 1646, the trustees of his almshouses accompanied the boys. The will was read and beer and plum rolls distributed. A remarkable feature of the bequest was that while the will is read one of the boys has to stand on his head.’

Poor child! I hope the will wasn’t a long one. Processions to beat the bounds are still made in some parishes such St Ives in Cornwall where the harvest of the sea is also blessed.

Seriously Inauthentic Rammalation Cake
I have made this up - truly. I wonder how long before it appears across cyber space as an authentic traditional English Rammalation Cake? – lets hope it starts a sort of culinary Chinese whispers. The spiral shape symbolises the circuit of the parish boundary, the icing dots are the boundary markers and the prunes are as required by Edward Wilkes’ will.

I made a sweet enriched bread dough with:
500g strong white flour,

75g sugar,

75g cooled melted butter
1 egg
I tsp salt
I tsp vanilla extract
1½ tsp dried yeast

Enough milk to make a soft dough – start with about 100ml and add more as you combine the ingredients.

For the middle:
500ml pitted prunes

75 g sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

Egg, glace icing, icing sugar and cinnamon to decorate.

Mix the dough ingredients together and knead well, leave to rise in a warm place for about 90 minutes. Soak 500g dried prunes then simmer until soft and add 75 g sugar and 1 teaspoon cinnamon. Mash it or blitz it to a smoothish puree. Roll out the dough quite thinly until it is about 24 inches long and 8 inches wide. Spread on the puree leaving the edges clear. Dampen these and then roll it up into a big sausage with the seam underneath. Form into a circle or spiral and put on a baking tray. Brush with beaten egg and leave to rise for another hour. Bake for 40 minutes, initially at 200c, turning the oven down to 180c after the first 10 minutes. Leave to cool then decorate.

Millie did a design in glace icing dots to symbolise the meandering route to the various boundary markers, then sprinkled the loaf with icing sugar and cinnamon.

'There is a joy in every spot, made known by times of old
New to the feet, although the tale a hundred times be told.'

John Keats (1795-1821) ‘Lines Written in the Highlands’

Many thanks to my wonderful niece Millie, who is promising to be as thoughtful and creative in the kitchen as everywhere else, and who helped a lot with both design and implementation of this cake.

25 March: Lady Day

‘After dinner to my papers and Tangier accounts again till supper, and after supper again to them, but by my mixing them, I know not how, my private and publique accounts, it makes me mad to see how hard it is to bring them to be understood, and my head is confounded, that though I did sweare to sit up till one o’clock upon them, yet, I fear, it will be to no purpose, for I cannot understand what I do or have been doing of them to-day.’

Diary of Samuel Pepys: Lady Day, Sunday 25 March 1666

Lady Day being nine months before Christmas Day is the Feast of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, the day of the Angel Gabriel’s visit. Until 1752 Lady Day was the day the New Year started in Great Britain. Most of the rest of Europe had adopted the Gregorian calendar with its January 1 New Year’s Day two hundred years previously, but for various political reasons, mostly to do with the Popish nature of the Gregorian calendar the Protestant British stubbornly refused to conform until the disparity became ridiculous. The practice of starting the New Year around the vernal equinox rather than in midwinter is understandable but it doesn’t fit the maths.
Lady Day was also an important date in the agricultural calendar as it was the starting date for agricultural leases and therefore one of the quarter days when the rent was due. As Samuel Pepys says above, it was also a time for doing your accounts and later for doing your tax return. When my ancestor John Hewson realised that his father’s farm would eventually pass intact to his elder brother Thomas, he left the family holding at Barnoldy Le Bec in Lincolnshire and rented his own farm nearby. He would have gone to pay his rent on the same day as Pepys wrote the entry above.
The English practice of primogeniture, although at first sight morally inequitable, led to interesting results. It prevented farms from being subdivided and made them more economical to run. It also shaped the physical landscape we can still see in the English countryside, and meant younger sons often left the land; they entered industry or went to the colonies – and the rest as they say, is history.
However fascinating though this is (for me) I’ve strayed away from Lady Day. In the days before any sort of security for an agricultural tenant, it was sensible for the wise farmer to keep on the right side of his landlord. So when you took a day off work to take him your rent, you also took a gift. Traditionally at Michaelmas this was a goose, spring offerings were more diverse as there wasn’t much in the store cupboard. Let us imagine that in 1666 John Hewson visits the agent of the Earl of Yarbrough with his rent and he takes with him a young lamb. Aries the Ram rules the skies, it’s auspicious.

Slow Roasted Lamb

Put the oven up to maximum heat and place the lamb in a roasting tin. I usually cook shoulder, but today it was a leg of Welsh lamb. Now add whatever aromatics you think appropriate. The ‘hard’ herbs are the ones to go for - rosemary, thyme, garlic, lavender, bay leaves. I used thyme and rosemary, the latter of course particularly appropriate today. You could also try some twiggy bits of oregano or marjoram, half an orange, or even handfuls of clean hay soaked in water – not as mad as it sounds, after all the hay went into the lamb in the first place.

When the oven is at full heat cover the lamb tightly with foil and put in the oven. Turn the heat down to 160c and bake for 4 hours. The meat will fall off the bone and you won’t have all the palaver of trying to carve a joint.

I roasted a tray of root vegetables to have alongside, and you do need something to cut the richness of the meat. The traditional British accompaniment to lamb and mutton is caper sauce but I think the idea of a white sauce with capers in it is revolting. I tossed a dessertspoonful of capers in the pan juices and added a slug of white wine, then I reduced it to a delicious syrupy gravy. Mustard or salsa verde would be good too.

Aren’t there annunciationsof one sort or another in most lives?
Some unwillingly undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride, uncomprehending.
More often those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from in dread,
in a wave of weakness,
in despair and with relief.

Ordinary lives continue…..

From ‘Annunciation’ by Denise Levertov (1923-1997)

21 March: Carlin Sunday

‘I eat my peas with honey,
I’ve done it all my life
It makes the peas taste funny
But it keeps them on the knife’

Traditional Childrens' Rhyme

A carlin is a dried pea, a soft greyish brown in colour, sometimes referred to as a pigeon pea. In the north east of England, the fifth Sunday of Lent is the traditional day for eating them. ‘Carlin’ is derived from the German word ‘Karr’ meaning atonement, and it used to be the custom according to ‘Folk Lore of East Yorkshire’ (Mrs Gutch, 1911) to eat them on the Fifth Sunday of Lent. Mrs Gutch also tells us that it was common ‘for the superior yeomanry to bequeath pulse, peas, beans and rye to their poor neighbours when disposing of their worldly effects’

What Mrs Gutch doesn’t mention is that East Yorkshire folk also say ‘Carlin Sunday’ is followed by ‘Farting Monday’ – way too much for her Edwardian sensibilities.

So as a descendent of both the ‘superior yeomanry’ and the ‘poor neighbours’ I started researching the way to serve carlin peas. Well first catch your pea I suppose. Neither of my local whole food shops – both very good ones, could help and a link to a promising Yorkshire grocer’s website seemed to be dead. So in the end I gave up. Carlin peas having been soaked and cooked are rolled in hot butter, sprinkled with salt and vinegar and served in a paper cone. I could not find them or face them even if I had, not even for you dear reader.

Apart from the first Sunday, all the Sundays in Lent have names: ‘Tid, Mid, Miseray, Carling, Palm and Paste Egg Day’ - Tid, Mid, and Miseray are named from the beginning of psalms and hymns traditional in services on that day; the Te Deum, Mi Deus and Misereri mei . So here we are, it’s the Fifth Sunday in Lent and I’ve nothing to show for it. Maybe its time to review our recent and future posts and fill a gap. We have done a soup recently for Lenten Fasting, we’ve done potatoes, we’ve got a goodly joint of meat this week for Lady Day and we’ve got figs coming up next Sunday.

Let’s have peas and lettuce the French way; simple, easy and cleansing. Scraping around in the garden I found the first, the very first, sprigs of mint – what a treat. The recipe is from ‘The Gentle Art of Cookery’ by Mrs Leyel and Mrs Hartley published by Chatto and Windus, I have the 1929 edition. I give to you it verbatim, it is indeed a relic from a more gentle age.

Petits Pois a la Française

‘Choose your peas carefully; shell, wash and drain them; put them in a casserole with good butter, a little salt, the hearts of two or three small lettuces, a bunch of parsley and shallots into which put a little piece of the herb savoury or mint and two cloves. Cook these over a slow fire, stirring them from time to time, but not adding any water. When they are nearly cooked, taste them and put in the casserole half a slice of bread and butter dipped in flour. When the peas are cooked, serve them.’

OK. So this is what I did.

I rubbed the bottom of a cast iron casserole dish with a little butter. Then I laid in it half an onion which I had sliced paper thin. I quartered a head of Little Gem lettuce then put it in with two mugs of frozen peas. I added salt, ground black pepper, a knob of butter, three big sprigs of parsley and one clove. I put on the lid tightly and put it on a low heat for about 10 minutes when I checked it wasn't sticking, turned over the lettuce pieces and gave it a stir. When the lettuce was warmed through but not soft I arranged it on a warm platter and sprinkled over fresh mint and more parsley. We ate it with home made fish cakes and tartare sauce.

It was delicious.

' .....Then he knows
The influence of the stars upon his meats
And all their seasons, tempers, qualities;
And so to fit his relishes and sauces
He has nature in a pot'

Ben Jonson (1572-1637) from ‘Staple of News’ 1625

14 March: Mothering Sunday

'I’ll to the a Simnell bring
Gainst thou go’st a mothering
So that, when she blessed thee,
Half that blessing thou’lt give to me.'

From ‘A Ceremonie in Gloucester’ by Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

During the period of abstinence that was Lent, the five Sundays didn’t count. Each Sunday was regarded as symbolic of the triumph of life over death, good over evil and so the normal fasting rules were relaxed. Lenten Sundays brought their own obligations however and the middle Sunday was for visiting one’s ’Mother Church’, the duty arising from the Epistle preached on that day – ‘Jerusalem; Mother of us all’

The maternal theme was extended to the practice of honouring not only the Mother Church but also one’s own mother. Young people in service therefore would be granted a day off to go home and visit their parents. Mothering Sunday was observed with varying degrees of regularity across England – more in the western counties than in the east, until it was taken over after the Second World War by that commercialised extravaganza that is ‘Mother’s Day’ which blesses florists and restaurateurs across the whole county and is an entirely American invention. The American festival is in May but the British had enough memory of Mothering Sunday to combine the events on the traditional Sunday in Lent.

Different regions had different traditions on Mothering Sunday; a family meal was a common practice, as it still is. This would be veal in Shropshire or pork stuffed with bay leaves in Warwickshire and as Robert Herrick says, daughters would often take their mothers a Simnel Cake. The origin of the word is uncertain; it is probably derived from ‘similia’ the Latin for flour. It has got nothing to do with Lambert Simnel the kitchen boy who claimed to be Richard Duke of York, one of the Princes in the Tower – the name predates his escapade. The earliest reference to Simnel Cakes occurs in 1042 in the archives of Winchester referring to the King’s gift of ‘simnels‘ to the convents of that city. The version of the Simnel cake we now accept as authentic is from Shrewsbury, this is the one with the marzipan balls on top representing the apostles.

Traditionally Simnel cake is made by the ‘boiled method’ i.e. the fruit is boiled with the sugars and fat before the cake is baked. I often make boiled fruit cake, it’s really easy. The recipe was given to me by my friend Pat years ago and I’ve used and abused it in many ways. For a Simnel cake you should aim for a fragrant light fruitiness – a ‘girly’ fruit cake rather than a rich mature one, my Simnel variation is below the basic recipe

Boiled Fruit Cake (Basic recipe)

Oven at 150c and an 8” spring form cake tin buttered and lined.

Wet Ingredients
12oz dried fruit
2oz mixed peel
6oz butter
4oz soft brown sugar
6oz golden syrup
¼ pint plus 4 tablespoons water.

Dry Ingredients
12 oz plain flour
2 level teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 teaspoon mixed spice
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt

2 eggs lightly beaten

Take all the wet ingredients and put in a pan. Bring to the boil and simmer for five minutes, then cool (very important). Weigh out dry ingredients (except eggs) into a bowl; now add the fruit mixture and the eggs, stir in gently until all is combined. Pour into the cake tin and cook for 1hour 30 minutes. Test with a skewer. It may need more time depending on your oven – mine is a hot fan oven. Yours may be cooler; it can take up to 2 hours.

My Simnel Variation

I used 10 oz sultanas and 2oz dried cranberries for my fruit and 10 oz plain flour with 2 oz ground almonds. I used orange juice instead of water, and for the spices I used cinnamon, mace, ground coriander and a teaspoon of dried ground orange peel. Put half the mixture into your cake tin, then put on a thin layer of almond paste. (You can use bought white marzipan – just not the yellow stuff OK?) Add the rest of the cake mixture and bake as above.

To decorate, brush the top of the cake with jam (apricot is best – sieved marmalade would do) roll out most of the other half of the marzipan to the size of the top, put it on and roll again to smooth it. You should have enough marzipan left over to make eleven little balls; they only need to be the size of marbles. I also like frosted spring flowers for decoration, the sort of posy a young village girl would take her mother. Paint the flowers with egg white and sprinkle with caster sugar, leave to dry, then carefully arrange on top.

Thanks to Anita for letting me raid her garden for the primroses and violets.

‘When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.’

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) From ‘At Parting’

The Lenten Fast

‘And thus they bid farewell to carnal dishes
And solid meats and highly spiced ragouts
To live for forty days on ill-dressed fishes
Because they have no sauces to their stews.’

George Gordon Lord Byron (1788-1824) ‘Beppo’

I can do no better than give you an extract from a 2003 article by one Agnes deLanavallei* published in ‘Tournaments Illuminated’ (which sounds like one of those magazines they feature at the end of ‘Have I got News for You’). She says:

‘The earliest Church fasts severely restricted all foods, but this gradually eased. Pope Gregory the Great wrote that "We abstain from flesh meat, and from all things that come from flesh, as milk, cheese, and eggs." This version of the fast …was the standard of the Roman Catholic Church throughout most of the Middle Ages. By the fifteenth century, however, milk, butter and cheese were generally allowed. Religious orders and devout individuals of course observed more stringent fasts.

Not all the definitions of flesh meat would please a modern biologist. Fish were a fast day food from before the Middle Ages. Since in Genesis the fish and birds were created to populate the waters and the heavens on the fifth day, and creatures of the earth created on the sixth day, a variety of interpretations pushed to include sea birds as fast day foods. The barnacle goose was obviously a fish, since it was believed to hatch from barnacles but puffins were also eaten. The beaver's scaly tail was described as 'the tail of a fish" in learned writings, that was taken as licence to eat beaver tails during Lent.

Since for much of the Middle Ages the Catholic Church was indeed the universal church, Lenten fasts dominated the spring for centuries. The details of course varied with region. But whether you were devout or casual in your beliefs, at Lent, the manors and palaces, taverns and monasteries, served only Lenten fast fare. Many, maybe most, people observed the Lenten fasts conscientiously, but the rest, whatever their preferences, found few alternatives. Spring meant Lent.’

Lent or not, the early spring was a very sparse time of year indeed. Winter stocks of food would be low or finished and not many spring vegetables were yet ready to eat. Any beasts kept over winter would be thin and not worth killing for food. Lent would have to be a time of frugality in any case. It was also a time for abstinence from love making or fighting, and you couldn’t marry or be baptised. There would be very little entertainment and people had to undertake weekly confession and be shriven – so lots of penances would have been handed out.

Even the rich had to abstain, although they did have the chance to use more expensive substitutes for meat. Almonds were often used in mediaeval cookery as a fasting alternative to chicken. Here’s an example of something that might have been served at the rich man’s table. The poor man at the gate was of course still eating pottage. It’s an adaptation of a wonderful ‘Moro’ recipe, so its origins are in Spain, where traditional food and festivals still abound.

Mushroom and Almond Soup

1 large onion finely chopped
3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
4 tablespoons olive oil
¾ teaspoon dried thyme
250g mushrooms - I used large flat ones chopped into small pieces
2 oz ground almonds (if you can, toast, blanch and grind them yourself)
3 or 4 pieces of dried porcini chopped and soaked
2 pints vegetable stock
4-5 tablespoons fino sherry
Salt and freshly ground white pepper
1 oz slivers of toasted almond
A big handful of parsley – finely chopped

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan. Add the chopped onion and garlic and sauté lightly for 15 minutes or until softened and light gold. Add the chopped mushrooms and continue to sauté until the mushrooms have stopped leaking moisture. Add the stock and porcini and ground almonds. Put in the porcini soaking water too, but strain it – it’s often gritty. Bring to the boil and simmer for 5 minutes. Taste and add 4 tablespoons of sherry, then a little more if you wish. At this point I blitz the soup with my stick blender. (Moro doesn’t, but I think it looks more appetising that way). Add the parsley, then taste and season with salt and freshly ground pepper. Serve with the flaked almonds on top of each bowl.

O how you'll for th’Aegyptian flesh-pots wish,
When you'r half-famished with your Lenten dish,
Your almonds, currans, biskits hard and dry,
Food that will Soul and Body mortifie

Aphra Behn (c1640-1689) ‘A Letter to a Brother of the Pen in Tribulation’

*Agnes deLanavallei (an actual 12c Angevin Lady) is the persona of Professor Kathleen Keeler, Emeritus Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska. Grateful thanks to her. You can read her whole fascinating article on recreating Mediaeval Lent at http://anvil.unl.edu/agnes/RecreatingLent.htm