Chocolate Biscuits – The Biscuit Bestiary

Posted on March 5, 2025March 7, 2025 by Elizabeth Evershed

‘Mpanatigghi

‘Mpanatigghi are… unusual in the biscuit world. Ancestry wise, you can trace them back to early modern Sicily. If they resemble a cross between a Cornish Pasty and Spanish empanada that’s because they are far more like either of these things than a traditional (British) biscuit. Sicilian Meat Cookies is a common English translation. Dolce di carne is another Italian name for them because they’re crafted from light pastry dough, dark chocolate, winter spices, nuts and… meat. Most of the pictures of them in the wild show them folded into half-moon shapes with the chocolatey filling bursting out of a hole at the top like so:

The ‘Mpanatigghi give a whole new meaning to the word ‘sweetmeat’ (a medieval term) and if you’re thinking the dark chocolate-beef combo sounds rather Mexican I’m with you. Modica, the town associated with them, is famous for its Aztec-inspired chocolate and Sicily’s hispanic culinary influences – hinted at in the semantic roots of the ‘Mpanatigghi being so similar to the empanada – are a throwback to the days the island was under Spanish control. I found a recipe online that seemed easy so decided to have a go myself, mixing up ground beef, ground almonds, grated dark chocolate, sugar and cinnamon for the filling (I left out the ground cloves as these were hard to find). A new adventure for me and this was the funnest part:

The end results were more like sedate mini English pasties with a weirdly chewy chocolatey centre. They’re not unpleasant and you could get used to them as a picnic item, but it’s fair to say they were more an oddity than a triumph and as I was too shy to offer them to my lunch guests on Sunday I’ve spent the week eating them up. I suspect I could find better recipes online (the proportions of dough to filling in this one were a little suspect) but I won’t be making them twice. If I ever visit Modica I’d love to try some authentic ones.

As for the moral, well, one story has it that a community of nuns in Modica first came up with the idea for ‘Mpanatigghi, slipping small amounts of ground beef or veal into their biscotti to hide among the sweet filling of nuts and dark chocolate. The point was to break the Lenten rules without observers knowing by smuggling meat into an innocent-looking, sweet-tasting biscuit. (Before modern times, chocolate, sugar and nuts could be eaten freely during Lent for those who could afford them; it was butter, eggs and meat that were frowned on.) The most sympathetic defence I’ve seen of this culinary sleight of hand is that the nuns were worried that six weeks without any red meat would have a deleterious effect on the monks and a little boost of protein would help them fulfil their preaching duties as they travelled from place to place during the fasting season!

Detail from the Maastricht Hours: Stowe MS 17, f. 38r

With Ash Wednesday upon us and the dubious example of the ‘Mpanatigghi before us, it begs the question of how we should fast as much as what we should fast from. Is there a right and a wrong way to do it? The answer from the Bible seems to be yes. Jesus had strong words to say about those who made a religious show of fasting, calling them hypocrites who had already received their reward from men (impressing others) and so shouldn’t hope to receive any reward from God. He also didn’t have much time for those who in their religious practices sacrificed as little as they thought they could decently get away with, knowing that such sacrifices, like the innocent-looking ‘Mpanatigghi, were more about the appearance than reality, of conforming outwardly, and little to do with the heart.

God is all about the heart, and in Lent the discipline of fasting becomes a means of purifying and softening it. Whether as a private or corporate undertaking, it can involve giving up all food or just luxury foods (as in the medieval fast) or some other act of self-denial like fasting from social media. Along with delayed gratification, self-denial is not something our culture is all that good at and the long Lent fasts were traditionally meant as a reflection of, and aid towards, cultivating humility before God. But as Jesus’s words showed, it’s definitely possible to fast in the wrong spirit and in one surprising passage in Isaiah God gets very irritated with those whose fasting hasn’t improved the condition of their hearts at all:

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?

Sharing your resources with the needy, standing with those who are oppressed and afflicted, not stirring up strife or constantly accusing others, or exploiting your employees or turning away from family who need you… This is the kind of fasting that moves God most apparently, and without it any outward acts of self-humbling fail to impress him.

For those who do try to fast in Lent in some way, these words are challenging and liberating in equal measure. Challenging because, if we’re honest, most of us identify real gaps between our ideals and actual behaviour when it comes to practising our faith; we don’t always live up to own standards let alone God’s. But liberating because the God who is so tough on religious hypocrisy continually shows himself soft on those who admit the gaps and come to him humbly with them, asking his help to change.

Further Reflection

More on the history of the ‘Mpanatigghi and a recipe if you fancy having a go at making them (there are simpler versions out there but this looks a bit better than mine!)

’40’ a short animated film by Si Smith imagining Jesus’s forty day fast in the Judean desert:

If you would like to see more entries more regularly and help keep this bestiary free of ads, you are welcome to contribute to the Biscuit Jar.

Posted on October 10, 2024October 10, 2024 by Elizabeth Evershed

The Jaffa Cake

I write this sitting in the attic of the London Library, listening to a very young and a very old scholar talking, watching the sun following the rain, the rain following the sun, and thinking about Jaffa Cakes (as one does). It’s the layer of orange jelly sandwiched between the sponge base and chocolate covering that gives the Jaffa Cake its name, recalling the sweetness of Jaffa Oranges. I’ve waited a long time to write about the Jaffa Cake, a staple of the McVitie’s range for almost a century. These days they come in boxes of 10 (I read somewhere they used to be 12, another casualty of the metric system?) and I have 7 left in this…

I think Jaffa Cakes go best with the citrus notes of a Lady Grey tea but I’ve paired mine with a Pret filter coffee (at just 49p with a re-useable cup, it has to be the cheapest coffee in London). The more astute among my readers will have noticed the word cake where biscuit is wont to be… The question of whether the Jaffa Cake is really a cake or a biscuit has never been settled to complete satisfaction and was the subject of a somewhat divisive marketing campaign this summer, the fruit of which can be seen on the billboard below:

‘The clue is on the box’ McVitie’s tell us in an attempt to shut down any arguments to the contrary but despite being labelled as a cake on the packaging, you’ll invariably find all the Jaffa Cakes hanging out with the biscuits in the supermarket aisles…

If you take an interest in biscuit trivia, you may remember the infamous 1991 Tribunal which overturned HM Customs and Excise’s ruling that the Jaffa Cake should be classed as a biscuit for tax purposes. Noting that there is now no generally accepted definition of either a cake or a biscuit, Mr Potter QC listed a number of ways in which the Jaffa resembles both, however the evidence which finally led to its being ruled a cake was its tendency to harden over time (stale biscuits get softer apparently). McVitie’s actually baked a giant Jaffa Cake to prove it.

Given this is a Biscuit Bestiary, you might expect to find me arguing for the Jaffa Cake’s re-classification as a biscuit, but I’d like to propose a more radical solution: what if it’s both at the same time? For in my mind, the dilemma posed by the Jaffa Cake in modern philosophy bears some resemblance to that of the early church grappling with the theology of the incarnation, the doctrine at the heart of the faith expressed in the Nicene Creed:

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father…

As a twelve year old attending an Anglican church that repeated the creed in its communion liturgy most weeks, I couldn’t understand the need for all these words, especially this bit. But what seems an incontrovertibly fixed doctrine to the majority of Christians today was once contested by the Arians and Docetists of the fourth century, or as I like to think of them the Exclusively-Cake and Exclusively-Biscuit camps of late antiquity. Neither camp could accept the orthodox position that Christ shared both a human and divine nature fully. The Arians emphasised the humanity of Christ at the expense of his deity (more Biscuit than Cake) and the Docetists his deity at the expense of his humanity (more Cake than Biscuit).

Historiated initial from BL Royal MS 6 E Vii2 502v

There’s a mystery to the incarnation, just as there’s a mystery to the Trinity. One evoked with the greatest poetry perhaps in the beginning of John’s gospel where the Word pitches his tent among us and the greatest warmth in St. Paul’s letter to the Hebrews, where he writes that ‘the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family’. I won’t spend a lot of time charting the ups and downs of the Council of Nicaea, or Athanasius who bravely stood his ground contra mundum (against the world) and flipped the tables on the Gnostics by arguing that Christ sanctified the body by being in it, but rather the beauty of the second person of God coming in flesh and blood to reveal the heart of the first to us.

And here we get to the moral of the extraordinary substance of the Jaffa Cake: just as those who persist in seeing it solely as a cake struggle to encounter it in the biscuit aisle, so those who refuse to see it as anything other than a biscuit will struggle to accept the evidence of their senses on biting into its aerated sponge. An appreciation of both together allow for the richest paradox and fullest picture. So the next time someone tries to corner you on whether it’s a Cake or a Biscuit, ask them why it can’t be both at the same time?

Further Reflection

The simplest explanation I can find of the whole Biscuit-Cake court case for those who have never heard of a Jaffa Cake and are unfamiliar with British tax law. Professor Tim Crane, who discusses the philosophical conundrum of the Jaffa Cake publicly in a number of places, posts a link to the analysis of Mr Potter QC on his website here. And here’s footage of the largest Jaffa Cake since records began (maximus in mundo?) courtesy of Radio 4’s Philosophers’ Arms, Bake-Off’s Frances Quinn, the Team at Hambleton Bakery, and the Guinness Book of Records:

Lastly, and more importantly, it wouldn’t be right to let mention of Jaffa oranges pass without remembering the sadness of much that’s happened in and around Israel and the Middle East this last year. May the year to come see the first fruits towards healing and the establishment of God’s peace in the region, the only peace that is the true and deep and lasting kind.

If you would like to see more entries more regularly and help keep this bestiary free of ads, you are welcome to contribute to the Biscuit Jar.

Posted on January 15, 2024January 20, 2024 by Elizabeth Evershed

Blue Riband

Morning, all. Today is popularly known as Blue Monday: a day popularly regarded as the most depressing day of the year although if you google the rationale for that you’ll find it’s just as popularly debunked as an advertising gimmick from the early 2000s. Whether justified or not, it’s fair to say that the idea has taken hold in the public imagination prompting a plethora of more or less helpful social media posts on the subject of depression and this rather esoteric one on the Blue Riband.

I’d forgotten all about the Blue Riband’s existence until December when a colleague drew parallels between it and a Slovakian biscuit she’d come across. I mentally dated the brand to the late 1980s (when I might have last eaten one) but it turned out to be a lot more venerable than I’d thought. It was Scottish biscuit giant Gray Dunn who began producing these biscuits in 1936 although sadly the Glasgow-based factory was forced to close in 2017. At 92 calories per bar, the Blue Riband is admittedly a light bite with what feels like a much thinner wrap-around of chocolate than either a Penguin or a Club Biscuit but an ambitious four layers of wafer underneath it. More than the milk chocolate, it’s the wafer which makes a bid for your taste buds.

The term Riband is an old fashioned word for ribbon: a very medieval spelling dating back to the mid fifteenth century, at least in the Oxford English Dictionary’s first attested use. The term Blue Riband also has the specialist sense, popular in the 1930s, of a metaphorical prize ribbon awarded to the liner capable of making the fastest crossing of the Atlantic from New York to Southampton. I suspect this is the original inspiration for its name but it was in use more generally before this to mean a mark of quality; this is where the notion of Cordon Bleu cooking is from, a reference to France’s chivalric order of the Holy Spirit whose knights were known as Les Cordons Bleus because of their light blue ribbons and whose banquets were said to offer exceptionally top nosh.

However, Bestiary readers might be interested to know that the Blue Riband has a claim to being one – maybe even the only – biscuit whose name is mentioned, albeit indirectly, in the King James Bible: “Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribband of blue,” God tells Moses in the Book of Numbers, a practice still observed by religious Jews today in the weaving and knotting of blue threads into talits or prayer shawls. “And it shall be unto you for a fringe, that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the Lord, and do them…” (Numbers 15).

Detail from the *Codex Rossianus, c.1453*

Why blue specifically? The short answer is because God said so… The speculative one opens out a lovely fan of references to this particular colour in scripture which suggests that if he has a favourite colour it might well be this one. When Moses, Aaron, and representatives of the twelve tribes meet with God on the top of Mount Sinai, we are told that “under his feet was something like a pavement made of lapis lazuli, as bright blue as the sky,” the likeness of a throne of lapis lazuli is mentioned in the revelation of God’s glory in Ezekiel, and the robe of the High Priest was made of blue cloth woven in one piece. A special shade of blue called tekhelet was used in the decoration of the temple and tabernacle as well as for the threads on the talits. It would have taken effort and expense to produce high quality blue dyes in the ancient world and in some sense that was part of the point: holiness for humans, meaning consecration or set-apartness for God, being something both costly and beautiful. As Chabad.org explains, the use of this specific blue for the prayer shawls was a mark of nobility, reminding the wearers of their place in God’s kingdom of priests.

The fringe or the hem of the garment where the tassels were was an important part of the wearer’s identity, even authority in the ancient world. Knowing this casts more light on the episode of David cutting off the corner of King Saul’s garment (and his remorse afterwards). Blue tassels or tzitzit were part of the garments worn by Jews in Jesus’s day. One of the most moving stories in the gospels is the healing of a sick, socially outcast woman who reaches out through the press of the crowd to touch the hem of Jesus’s garment. “For she said to herself, ‘If only I may touch his garment, I shall be made well’…” (Matthew 9:21)

Image from a 4th century wall painting from the **Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter**, near Rome.

As a colour in the Middle Ages, blue has a whole range of literary associations of which my favourite is constancy or steadfastness. This is not so surprising if you consider it is also the colour of the sky and sea (on a good day) both of which remind us of immensity and eternity. Blue or sometimes blue-toned teal frequently features in cross-cultural surveys as the world’s most popular colour, which suggests it appeals to something deep within the human spirit. Maybe we’re drawn to blue out of a heavenly homing instinct? “He has set eternity in the human heart,” writes the author of Ecclesiastes, no stranger to every kind of blueness. “Yet no-one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

Wester Ross, Scotland. Photo credit: Annie Ede

Drawing all these threads together I hope, like me, you will think a little differently about the Blue Riband, and wish you all a tekhelet-toned Monday full of the deep consolations of God.

Further Delectation

Blue Monday or Brew Monday? Here’s a little piece from the Samaritans dispelling the myth of Blue Monday and encouraging us all to reach out and connect over a cuppa.

An excellent initiative to give out free biscuits with that cuppa this year. Coming soon to a station near Luton.

A recording of Adrian Plass’s poem A Hopeful Shade of Blue from Shipwrecks & Islands:

If you would like to see more entries more regularly and help keep this bestiary free of ads, you are welcome to contribute to the Biscuit Jar.

Posted on March 17, 2023March 19, 2023 by Elizabeth Evershed · 3 Comments

The Club Biscuit

Welcome to the Club. Like the trusty Penguin, this doughty milk chocolate biscuit evokes the nostalgia of an 80s childhood and the advertising slogan sung by the kids in commercials: if you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit join our club! I never did find out how to join exactly but if buying a packet of these is the price of entry, I’m in. In Great Britain Club biscuits are produced by McVitie’s but in Ireland – where they hail from – they’re made by Jacob’s, better known in the UK as a maker of savoury biscuits and crackers. It’s a company that still exists in name at least but sadly no longer operates from the Emerald Isle.

I must admit I only clocked that the Club was Irish when I did a little research on Irish biscuits for St Patrick’s Day. It was difficult to find recipes that seemed authentically Irish as opposed to just ordinary biscuits flavoured with a dash of Guinness or Bailey’s (an Irish cookie to go with your Irish coffee, Sir?) but I did come across a few species of biscuit I hadn’t come across before such as Lace Biscuits and the fondly remembered Mallows / Mikados. However, the Club seemed the most appropriate choice for St Patrick’s Day for reasons I hope will become apparent the deeper we delve…

As you can see from the picture below, the Club is a solid-looking biscuit: a veritable chocolate bullion in a silvery wrapper containing about the same satisfying thickness of chocolate as you’d get in a McVitie’s Gold Bar. The crunchy middle layer is entirely surrounded by a thick and delicious wall of chocolate. This mint chocolate version was so strongly scented I could smell the mint through the foil!

According to that august online authority, A Nice Cup of Tea and A Sit Down, the original Milk Club predates the First World War and creation of modern Ireland. In their 2008 entry they could only find the original Milk Clubs on Ireland’s West Coast but a recent check reassured me that Jacob’s still make them for their Irish market. (The other flavoured varieties UK biscuit lovers are more familiar with were first produced for the UK at a later date from a satellite factory in Liverpool.)

It also surprised me to discover that the reason these biscuits were known as Clubs has nothing to do with the clubbability factor. Instead, it refers to the design stamped on the wrappers of the original Milk Club, the same symbol for the Club suite on a pack of playing cards which in turn reminded me, perhaps intentionally on the Jacob brothers’ part, of the seamróg or shamrock: the three-leaved clover that, along with the harp, is a famous symbol of Ireland. Whichever type of clover it was, or if it ever actually existed, St Patrick is supposed to have used it as an illustration of the Trinity in his efforts to convert the pagan Irish to Christianity – a great story, even if it is almost certainly an early modern fabrication.

A medieval illustration of a clover from BL Egerton MS 747, c. 1280-1310.

It may also surprise some readers to discover Patrick himself was not Irish but Romano-British back in a time when relations between the two islands were freer and simpler. While the history is a little hazy, the best guess seems to be that he was Welsh or Scottish, and that he was captured by raiders and taken off to Ireland as a slave while still a young teenager. It was there, in his desperation, that he found God, who he says protected and consoled him like a father. He actually tells us a little of his story first-hand in his Confessio: an English translation can be found here and is short enough to read in a coffee break (with your choice of biscuit):

So I am first of all a simple country person, a refugee, and unlearned. I do not know how to provide for the future. But this I know for certain, that before I was brought low, I was like a stone lying deep in the mud. Then he who is powerful came and in his mercy pulled me out, and lifted me up and placed me on the very top of the wall…

While Patrick describes himself as unlearned and perhaps believed that to be true, his writing reveals him to be immersed in the scriptures. This passage reads like a vivid illustration of Psalm 40, where God lifts the despairing David ‘out of the mud and the mire’. Browsing the Confessio this week, I was struck by how similar parts of it feel to the letters of St. Paul who likewise felt caught up in a divine commission to advance a faith he’d formerly rejected. To my mind the Confessio offers us a more believable account of the career of a fifth-century missionary than the fantastical tales of evicting all the snakes from Ireland (a common story among early Celtic saints: Hild of Whitby and Columba of Iona are rumoured to have done something similar). Far from lowering him in the reader’s estimation, Patrick’s account of his life has the effect of raising it. It certainly reads like that of a very ordinary man in some respects, but the light that shines through it all is one of honesty and holiness.

St. Patrick from *BL Royal MS 17 B. xliii, f. 132v*

Like Paul, Patrick is candid about his hardships but also of the love that drove him to return to Ireland to preach to the people there. In another memorable passage, we get a glimpse of him doing it:

The sun which we see rising for us each day at his command — that sun will never reign nor will its splendour continue forever; and all those who adore that sun will come to a bad, miserable penalty. We, however, believe in and adore the true sun, that is, Christ, who will never perish. Nor will they perish who do his will but they will abide forever just as Christ will abide forever…

This acknowledgement that the sun would one day burn out may seem prescient in view of what is now common scientific knowledge, but the strictures against solar adoration may strike a modern reader as peculiar. It is details like this however that give the Confessio another touch of authenticity as many of the people Patrick came into contact with were still influenced by older pagan druidic cultures that had worshipped the sun. (‘They can’t have worshipped much…’ quipped the late great Terry Wogan in his commentary on the Eurovision Song Contest in one of the many years Ireland hosted it.)

Patrick’s metaphor of Christ as the true and lasting sun is a good illustration of the way in which Celtic Christianity sought to build as many bridges as walls between the pagan and Christian understanding of life which shared a reverence for the beauty and power of language and nature. Although it’s debatable whether he himself authored it, the well-known Hymn of St Patrick is in this tradition:

Christ as a light illumine and guide me.
Christ as a shield overshadow me.
Christ under me, Christ over me.
Christ beside me on my left hand and my right…

And the moral? Just as a solid wall of chocolate covers every part of the Club biscuit so wonderfully, so in prayer we are invited to follow Patrick (and other medieval Celtic Christians) in invoking Christ’s special presence and protection. Encircling prayers, as they are sometimes called. Not a bad place to start – and end – the week (thank God it’s a Friday!) Wishing a Very Happy St Patrick’s Day to all who celebrate it.

Further Delectation

Can’t get to Ireland for St Patrick’s Day? Let the internet bring it to you…

More on St. Patrick and the Confessio from the British Library Medieval Manuscripts blog (and see the text of the original – with helpful contextual resources – here).

Stumped by Shamrocks? Here are some of the elusive facts surrounding the symbolic clover.

And finally, a chance to put on St Patrick’s Breastplate and the Armour of God for those looking for extra spiritual cover! (And a special credit is due to the musician responsible for the beautiful adaptation of the hymn in the above video: www.dwightbeal.com)

If you would like to see more entries more regularly and help keep this bestiary free of ads, you are welcome to contribute to the Biscuit Jar.

Posted on October 14, 2021October 20, 2021 by Elizabeth Evershed · 1 Comment

Chocolate Pearl Biscuits

It may surprise you to know that the medieval borough of Southwark (pronounced Suth-erk to confuse the tourists) is famous for more than its pubs and pilgrimages. The Peek Freans biscuit factory was based here in Bermondsey for more than a century, and was the first company to mass produce such classics as the Garibaldi and the Bourbon. It was also the maker of the first ‘soft’ biscuit to be sold in Britain, the Pearl Biscuit. This was a species I’d never heard of until I did a little research into it recently, and it has almost disappeared from British Isles (or aisles?) now but there is still one place you can find them if you look for them…

At £7.95 a tin, Fortnum and Mason’s Chocolate Pearl Biscuits are the most expensive biscuits I’ve ever purchased for the Bestiary but as the store is practically next door to the London Library I’m stowing them here in the members’ attic as treats to share with writing friends (Fortnum’s assertion that “the trickiest part of eating these delicious things is keeping them from the clutches of your tea-time guests” doesn’t strike me as very public-spirited). As you’d probably expect from their provenance, these are a bit of a luxury: dry and deliciously buttery with chocolate pearls from the Rhône Valley. Pearls of great price indeed!

“…the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls,” Jesus explained to the crowds listening to his parables. “When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.” (Matthew 13:45). This famous story of the Pearl of Great Price is paired in the gospels with that of the man who finds hidden treasure in a field. I think of T.S. Eliot’s beautiful lines in Little Gidding about this place we’re all looking for, which is somehow the place we return to as well as that we’re seeking to discover:

…half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always —
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)

Costing not less than everything… The older I get, the more I think I see a little more of what Jesus meant when he told us your treasure is where your heart is and asked what profit it would be to gain the whole world yet lose your own soul. To ask ourselves where our treasure lies – what we’re fixing our attention on and our hopes for the future – is a discipline that can reveal to us our inner poverty, but if our hopes aren’t built on anything of real and lasting value it’s best we know it now. And on the other side of that question, what if there are more valuable treasures out there that we haven’t discovered yet? How do we find this pearl worth giving everything to own?

Further Delectation

A fun little history of Peek Freans Company from Tea, Toast and Travel (including very old footage of the biscuit factory from the early 1900s).

Here for the pearls more than the biscuits? You may like to read more about lapidaries (medieval descriptive catalogues that are much like bestiaries but for precious stones).

The Middle English poem, Pearl, may well have been inspired by this parable: a poignant dream poem thought to be a reaction to the loss of a child. It was written in a Northern English dialect that’s harder to read today than Chaucer’s but Simon Armitage’s modern translation is very accessible. You can read more about the poem and its history here or listen to the opening of the poem sung by the Mediaeval Baebes.

Image of the dreamer and his lost pearl from the Pearl poem BL Cotton MS Nero A X/2

If you would like to keep this bestiary free from ads and see more entries more regularly you are welcome to contribute to the Biscuit Jar.

Posted on February 11, 2021February 14, 2021 by Elizabeth Evershed

Penguin Biscuits

What with the cold and the gloom, I haven’t felt much like shopping for biscuits these last few weeks but I did p-p-p-pick up a penguin or eight from the local supermarket to see me through this wintery weather. It does the heart good to look in on the impromptu party they’re throwing in the writing room this week. The little fella with the hat and horn-blower is my favourite. (And before anyone asks, yes, they’re all from the same household.)

Penguins were a lunchbox staple of my childhood and I was happy to find they still come with jokes on their wrappers (‘How did the penguin pass his driving test?’ ‘He winged it.’). Judging from the plumage, these are probably kings or emperors. There’s no penguin design on the bar itself, a modest chocolate sandwich, but there’s something comfortingly solid about this species and they’ve certainly had their sincere and not so sincere imitators over the years from the dubious Puffin take-off to the high-flying Australian Tim Tam.

Penguins are not a feature of medieval bestiaries. The earliest possible sighting of any that Europeans were aware of may well have been the flightless ducks observed by the crew of the Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama on his expedition to the Cape of Good Hope in 1497 (if so, the penguins surprised them by braying like donkeys). It’s a pity because bestiarists of all people would have appreciated this bird’s admirable qualities, its endearing clumsiness on shore and gracefulness in water for example, and still more its powers of endurance.

We’ve had need of that power these last few weeks. Collectively I suspect this has been the worst winter in recent memory in Britain and certainly within my lifetime. It’s been tough in ways few could have imagined a year or perhaps even half a year ago. And yet here we are. I understand better now why so many of the New Testament writers make such a virtue of endurance; it may not be the most appealing fruit of the spirit to try to cultivate, but how necessary it is for the long haul. ‘If we can winter this one out, we can summer anywhere,’ as Heaney put it, a quote that’s been circulating in lockdown for obvious reasons.

‘February’ in a 15th c. Book of Hours from Burgundy. (NY Public Library MS. Spencer 43, fol. 7r)

For the New Testament writers, the power of endurance promises us something more solid than simply wintering it out for the sake of survival, of gritting our teeth and rolling with the punches, although it’s definitely contained an element of that for me this month. St Paul tells us that it builds character and character hope, which begs the question of how we can find ways of enduring that allow us to emerge from this season in a stronger position spiritually than when we went into it?

When I look back to some of the toughest periods of my life before the pandemic I can see ways in which this strengthening process was already beginning. I haven’t doubted God’s presence with us throughout all this but I have come face to face with my own insufficiency to weather these new challenges without help, both from other people and from Him. There’s been a humbling and a levelling in that: a recognition that we’re all human, all vulnerable. But also new revelation that God’s grace has always been sufficient, his strength made more and more visible in our lives when we trust him with our weakness. So today my prayer for us all is that we might not only endure through this season but grow in hope and strength through it, inspired by the p-p-p-perseverance of the Penguin.

Further Delectation

What are the rival claims of the Penguin and the Tim Tam to biscuity greatness? Which Antarctic explorer was better at drawing penguins? How does a bird the same weight as a baby hippo get itself back out of the water? All your questions answered by the experts!

Enjoy a short but interesting read on medieval iconography for February from Princeton’s Index of Medieval Art site. Or if you’re impatient for the spring to come it may help to know it started on the 7th of February in the medieval calendar as the Clerk of Oxford explains in this lovely piece on early medieval celebrations of spring and its poetry.

No feathered friends where you are? Take a little time to tune in to some live penguin action from California. Recommended for a relaxing mini-break with a coffee and biscuit:

If you would like to see more entries more regularly and help keep this bestiary free of ads, you are welcome to contribute to the Biscuit Jar.

Posted on August 26, 2020October 12, 2024 by Elizabeth Evershed

Latvian Beciņas

The very generous Dr Davis has been foraging for biscuits again and this month we have two exciting new specimens from the Baltic States, both of which resemble mushrooms. On opening this parcel I did wonder if he had picked them straight from the forest but the great clerks of the internet helped me identify them as Beciņas ar šokolādes micītē (mushrooms with chocolate caps).

The sponginess of the stalks and firmness of the caps reminded me of Jaffa Cakes although they look a bit different. The root of the stalk is dipped in chocolate and poppy seeds and they really are delicious with coffee. If you’re wondering how they get their distinctive shape, they’re baked in special pans with mushroom-shaped moulds. I was excited to discover the Beciņas are a Latvian specialty and a work colleague tells me they have something very similar in Lithuania, albeit with white instead of dark chocolate.

With half of the country covered in woodland, walking and foraging in the forest is a popular Latvian past-time. The official mushroom picking season lasts from August to October although happily these specimens can be found all year long. For a whole week in July I looked forward to my mornings with coffee and Beciņas and foraging for a moral for this biscuit got me thinking about everything wild spaces have to offer us.

This lovely painting of a forest glade is by German artist Ernst Ferdinand Oehme. Such scenes are called Waldinerres in German, which sounds a little like the Middle English Wyldrenesse or wilderness. Like the forests of medieval romance, the wilderness can be a place of refuge but also disorientation. A place where our old props and certainties are taken from us. This may feel bewildering (‘to be lost in pathless places, to be confounded for want of a road’) but as a friend of mine from the Wirral says it’s in the wilderness that God speaks.

In one of the great medieval adventure poems of the fourteenth century, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Gawain embarks upon a journey he never expected, accepting the deathly challenge of a mysterious green knight and riding deep into the ‘wyldrenesse of Wyrale’. I won’t give too much of the plot away — the whole story is worth reading and it’s marvellous — but it’s fair to say that what Gawain finds in the forest is not victory or defeat (or mushrooms) but a powerful dose of self-knowledge. In the process he also discovers that the knight waiting for him at the Green Chapel is not the dread opponent he thought but something far kinder and wiser and harder to fathom.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is sirgawainandthecottonmsneroax2f129v-4.jpg

Further Delectation

Another great Northern poet, Simon Armitage, introduces Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and you can read the poem in Middle and Modern English via Luminarium. Can’t get to the outdoors right now? Take a virtual tour of Latvia’s lovely forests and castles or listen to this week’s magical Story from the Borders of Sleep. This latest podcast, written and narrated by Seymour Jacklin, is all about hermits, forests and the wisdom of green places. Too busy for all this? You may need to ruthlessly eliminate hurry. Here’s some help to make a start on it.

If you would like to see more entries more regularly and help keep this bestiary free of ads, you are welcome to contribute to the Biscuit Jar.

Posted on September 5, 2019October 30, 2019 by Elizabeth Evershed

Dark Chocolate Gingers

In last Sunday’s evening service we were invited to try a short session of contemplative prayer with the help of an icon or a passage from the bible. Imagine my delight when the gentleman next to me rose to his feet and announced that he was moving to the back of the church to meditate on the biscuits. Which just goes to show you never know when a stranger might appear with a word from the Lord…

native — Message (and messenger) by catapult. From the BNF MS of Jean de Wavrin’s histories of Britain.

For a while now I’ve been eager to meditate on Dark Chocolate Gingers. Border Biscuits make some particularly fine ones and as they’d previously always been available in my local supermarket it never crossed my mind that they might disappear from the shelves without notice. Having hunted and failed to find them elsewhere, I was all set to do a post on the Dark Chocolate Ginger Night of the Soul when my friend Cath found me a new brand from Sainsbury’s. Honesty compels me to admit these are Not-Quite-As-Dark Chocolate Gingers but the lower cocoa content is more than made up for by the thickness of the chocolate coating, not to mention its jaunty stripes.

Sainsbury’s Dark Chocolate Gingers on a Roof Terrace in Peckham.

I’ve known biscuit lovers who dislike ginger, but I’ve always loved its pep and fieriness. The hospitable warmth of gingerbread is one of the great joys of Christmas and the McVities ginger nut (less fashionable than it used to be) gloriously dunkable with tea. Another brilliant ginger creation, Marks and Spencer’s stem ginger cookies, belongs in my mind to that stratosphere of gustatory pleasures in which you might enjoy a choice marmalade after a leisurely breakfast. The Dark Chocolate Ginger strikes me as more of a late morning luxury or happy after-thought to an evening meal. Ginger could be expensive in the Middle Ages and while not as sought after as pepper, it was valued for its medicinal benefits more than its culinary ones. A strong dose of ginger can be a shock to the system, but as a winter spice it can also be deliciously warming, healing and cleansing – like truth itself when it’s let loose on the world.

August Bank Holiday cornfield near Tudeley-cum-Capel.

If ginger stands for truth, then chocolate and ginger together make a good advert for speaking the truth in love. Our ability to receive truth increases when we sense the truth-teller is not out to score points for themselves or condemnation for others but genuinely trying to find a path towards collective healing and freedom. This can be a hard path to follow when you’re feeling hurt and angry (or timid or selfish) but anything less is neither truthful nor loving in the long run.

Further Delectation

Spice up your life (or spruce up your knowledge) with this short survey of winter spices in the Middle Ages.

Enjoy George Herbert’s beautiful meditation on The Way, the Truth and the Life, the equally wonderful music of Vaughan Williams, and a singing monk lost in Grand Central Station:

If you would like to see more entries more regularly and help keep this bestiary free of ads, you are welcome to contribute to the Biscuit Jar.

Posted on July 31, 2019September 30, 2023 by Elizabeth Evershed

Grisbi Extreme Chocolate Cookies

Biscuits can be a lot like buses – after a dearth of specimens to sample I suddenly got three through at once. The first is from a new friend of mine called Dāvis, a fan of the bestiary in Latvia. I posted him some biscuits a few months ago to help him through his medical exams and he kindly returned the favour with these Grisbi Extreme Chocolate cookies from Matilde Vicenzi. These chunky flat Italian creations certainly live up to their name as they really are very chocolatey. The weather was so hot when I opened the packet I opted to try them out on the terrace with tea and ice cream…

While I don’t like ranking biscuits any more than people, I have to say this is chocolate of a high order and so rich it makes for the perfect dessert biscuit (more on that elusive genre at a later date). The gooeyness of the centre was an unexpected surprise, especially for an Italian biscuit as these tend to be dryer than the British sort. Anyone eyeing it from the outside could be forgiven for imagining it was the same texture all the way through and I must say I’m intrigued by the combination of outer crumbliness and inner creaminess its makers have managed to pull off.

For the moral I couldn’t help but think of the prophet Samuel’s words when choosing a new king for Israel: ‘People judge by outward appearances but the Lord looks at the heart.’ Leaving aside the fact that the Lord’s choice, David, was apparently good-looking as well as goodhearted (some kings get all the luck), Samuel’s words are a sober reminder that what impresses on the surface does not necessarily make the best criteria for judging an individual’s worthiness or fitness for office.

I expect it’s almost as rare for a people to find a true leader as it is for God to find a man after his own heart, yet that is the astonishing epithet applied to David in the Bible. And as far as we can tell the forging of this extraordinary heart came about long before anyone but God knew who David was, in the long conversations they had together with no-one but the sheep to overhear them. We can eavesdrop a little on some of those conversations in the Book of Psalms, many of which are believed to have been written by the king over the course of his lifetime. Here’s an image of him in the throes of composition from an early 15th century Italian manuscript:

hb_28.225.65.jpg — Image from New York’s Met Museum

What’s refreshing about the David of the Psalms is his no-holds-barred abandon in expressing himself to God: every joy and confidence, every doubt and fear and angry thought let out into the wild and starry open. ‘Slap all my enemies in the face!’ he prays in Psalm 3, something we don’t sing in churches very much. We can admire a great soul like Gandhi for his commitment to non-violence, but David’s radical honesty about the state of his soul shows us something of what it means to have a great heart. Despite all his faults and failures, it’s hard not to love the David who mourned and the David who danced, the David who argued and pleaded and repented without caring what anybody thought of him. The David, above all, whose heart God saw and loved, and the David to whom he gave an everlasting kingdom.

Further Delectation

A lovely setting of one of David’s Psalms by John Michael Talbot.

Some beautiful medieval Psalters from the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum.

If you would like to see more entries more regularly and help keep this bestiary free of ads, you are welcome to contribute to the Biscuit Jar.

Posted on June 20, 2019January 12, 2022 by Elizabeth Evershed

Roshen Hazelnut Wafers

I’ve been saving these hazelnut wafers for the Feast of Corpus Christi, another of those moveable feasts in the Church calendar which falls on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday. Gareth kindly sent these along with the Chocoline Cookies as another example of Eastern Europe biscuitry, but sadly they have not weathered the journey quite as well. The first few I extracted from the packet broke apart in my hands and I had to dig down a layer or two to find some that were more intact, like this one:

A very innocent looking biscuit, you wouldn’t dream its Ukrainian manufacturers had been banned from exporting it (and other Roshen products) in a now infamous ‘chocolate war‘ with Russia. While the outer layers of wafer crumble easily, they are light and sweet as well as splintery – and the crumbly bits could well find their home in a dessert of some kind. The hazelnut-flavoured chocolate filling is also very pleasant and nicely complimented with a mid-strength coffee.

The easily breakable wafers reminded me of other wafers with a history of being broken: the little disks of bread that symbolise (or, according to Catholic doctrine, actually become) the body of Christ and his real presence with us in the Eucharist. It’s a celebration that can take many forms, but is in essence a very simple thing: the breaking of bread and drinking of wine together as he commanded us to do at the Last Supper.

For in the night in which he was betrayed, he took bread; and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, Take, eat, this is my Body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me…

This year my friend Sarah wrote a poem which illuminated one particular sentence in the accounts of that supper that I’d never noticed before. The line where Jesus says, ‘I have longed to eat this Passover Meal with you.’ The word longed brought me up short. Naturally it’s not the same word in all translations, but most English texts use something similar such as ‘very eager’ or ‘earnestly desired’. Somehow I’d never given it its proper weight. That in the night in which he was betrayed, in the final hours before the torture of the cross and all its terrible rejection and humiliation (all of which he had already foreseen and steeled himself to go through) there was something he had been looking forward to. Because the sacrifice of his body and blood wasn’t about saving us so he could save us, but saving us so he could be with us – about sharing a meal with his friends.

Further Delectation

A medieval poem for Corpus Christi from the Clerk of Oxford.

This moving post by Joy Clarkson with a link to Gavin Bryar’s Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet (if you’ve never heard it before, you might want to read the story of how it came to be written).

In the late middle ages, Corpus Christi was celebrated with processions and mystery plays in England. You can read more about them and modern revivals here and here, and here’s an early fifteenth-century Corpus procession from BL MS Harley 7026:

Harley 7026 f. 13 Corpus Christi procession

If you would like to see more entries more regularly and help keep this bestiary free of ads, you are welcome to contribute to the Biscuit Jar.