christianity – The Biscuit Bestiary

I meant to post an entry before this but life got in the way. It’s still getting in the way, but I didn’t want to pass up this opportunity to write about Soul Cakes: a biscuit traditionally made and eaten over Hallowtide and almost forgotten now but which was once a regular part of this season in medieval England. I’ve been meaning to write about this biscuit for ages and received a little kick up the backside to do it this last weekend when I visited the medieval manor house of Brockhampton, which made rather a feature of them for its 600 year anniversary.

If you’re not sure what Hallowtide is welcome to post-Reformation Britain. It does have something to do with Halloween, so called because it is the evening before All Hallows Day (also All Saints Day) on the 1st of November and All Souls Day on the 2nd, both of which the medieval Church observed with a good deal more fanfare than we do now. While all Christians are called saints in the New Testament writings, there are some who are remembered with a capital S in Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican traditions for having a profound influence for good in their lifetimes and beyond. All Saints Day was for honouring these saints who had passed into glory whereas All Souls Day (an eleventh century development) was for all souls who had died in the faith. It seems likely it was about this time that the Soul Cake tradition really came into its own…

At a time where most people in England identified as Christian and believed in a literal Heaven and Hell, there was also a common belief in a place called Purgatory where souls of the departed in need of cleansing (purgation) would be sent after death to be purified before entering Heaven. The prayers of the living were believed to help speed their progress through this realm. If you were wealthy, you might have a chantry built where prayers and masses could be offered for you or your dead loved ones. If you were poor, you could visit the wealthier houses promising to say prayers for departed souls in return for a freshly baked biscuit. In the sixteenth century Shakespeare is still referring to this custom of going from house to house like “a beggar at Hallowmass”, a practice that might include games and ‘guising’ (or disguising as we say now). Souling persisted into the nineteenth century in parts of the North and Midlands despite some Protestant disapproval. It’s hard to tell whether this was for noble reasons (concern for the dead) or more, ahem, soulish ones (a love of biscuits). Here’s a lovely little clip of Sting singing a song about Souling in Durham Cathedral:

The Brockhampton estate had provided visitors with a medieval recipe for Soul Cakes which I thought I’d try on returning home to Peckham. It looked authentic as there were no measurements (always frustrating to the modern cook) so I went for pastry-like ratios of butter to flour, added the more dubious ingredients along with currants, ground cloves and nutmeg and some mixed spice in the absence of mace (another form of nutmeg). Wine and ale were included, with wine seemingly used as a mixer so I ended up using some cheap Merlot to bind it, thinking afterwards that white wine might have been better as the display cakes didn’t have the reddish tinge of mine. I used a thin wine glass to press them into rounds and marked them with a cross as instructed before trying them in the oven at Gas Mark 6 for about 12-15 minutes. They emerged pretty well cooked but didn’t seemed to rise at all in spite having a packet of dry yeast in them, but the recipe had required ‘cold’ butter and gave no time for proving. To be honest they’re tastier than I expected, even if they do taste a little like pastry soaked in mulled wine, and I look forward to offering them to any puzzled Trick-or-Treaters this weekend.

The Bible prohibits attempts to make contact with the dead through spiritualism or occultism on the grounds that doing so attracts spiritual forces of evil (the darker side of Halloween, then and now) – a very serious warning. But praying to and for the dead isn’t forbidden, even though the more reformed churches don’t believe it to be scriptural. The Anglican Church has a beautiful prayer for the departed in its funeral liturgy: O Father of all, we pray to thee for those whom we love, but see no longer. Grant them thy peace; let light perpetual shine upon them; and in thy loving wisdom and almighty power work in them the good purpose of thy perfect will… The Old English word bereft describes the experience of grief powerfully, evoking the violent theft of something precious (‘to deprive, rob, strip, dispossess’). Death feels unnatural because it is unnatural and the heart struggles to process it. It still yearns for some kind of connection between the past and the present. It still reaches out in love.

Mary Magdalene in mourning, from the fourteenth century ‘Stowe Breviary’ BL Stowe MS 12.

It is here the value of Hallowtide becomes apparent in reminding us of the Communion of Saints, “dead” and living. I put scare quotes around dead here because while Jesus grieved with those who mourned in this life, we find him arguing with the Sadducees who disbelieved in the Resurrection that “Even Moses demonstrates that the dead are raised… For he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to Him all are alive.” According to St. Paul, the faithful departed are still very much in existence and part of the Great Cloud of Witnesses cheering us on. Not only are they alive with God, but in some sense they are even more alive than the living are. Whether or not they can actively help us with their prayers or we can help them with ours is just detail; the key point is that, whether we sense it or not, we are all part of this glorious Communion.

“The Great Cloud of Witnesses” Artist unknown

This is important because, as Norwegian bishop and writer Erik Varden says, there’s an insidious voice that likes to tell us we’re alone, but the fundamental statement of Christianity is to convict that voice of lying. Love really is stronger than death and one day God will swallow up death forever (Isaiah 25). I think that’s worth celebrating with a Soul Cake or two this Hallowtide. Blessed All Hallows Eve, All Hallows Day, and All Souls (Cakes?) Day when it comes.

Further Delectation

More information on Hallowtide and Souling traditions from English Heritage and a good short article on the post-Reformation history of Hallowmass by Professor Helen Parish.

For a quick tour through a medieval landscape of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, Dante Alighieri is your man. For a survey of the history of Purgatory (still present in a revised form in Catholic doctrine but rejected by the reformers) see this helpful explanation.

And here’s Erik Varden’s book, The Shattering of Loneliness (recommended).

And finally, nothing to do with Hallowtide per se but my friend Paul put me on to this wonderful medievalist adaptation of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire by those divas at Bardcore. Very funny and very clever:

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Just when most Christians in the West are taking down their Christmas trees, Christians in the East are breaking their Advent Fast, so this 7th of January may I wish you a very happy Orthodox Christmas in the company of some Egyptian Kakh? Kakh are probably the closest Egypt comes to a national biscuit. They are traditionally made as treats for both Christian and Muslim festivals, and were probably eaten in some form or other as far back as the time of the Pharaohs, which means they may actually be the oldest biscuit to be featured on the Bestiary thus far. So it seems fitting they are associated with the High Holy Days of one of the world’s oldest Christian communities: the Coptic (Egyptian Orthodox) Church.

Disclaimer: I don’t know much about the Orthodox Church but what I do know was enriched by an ecumenically-minded ‘taster day’ of sorts at Southwark Cathedral last year (although it did not include any tasting of Kakh). The programme featured talks from representatives of the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches as well as British icon maker Aidan Hart. Brief as it was it communicated something of the understanding of the nature of God and the life of faith the Orthodox have stewarded through the ages that impressed me with its beauty, discipline, and reverence for mystery and holiness. Elements we have not always reflected as consistently in our traditions in the West. As Hart reflected, “the secular world is more likely to try to sedate us than to kill us”. One of the insights I took from his talk was that worship in the Orthodox Church is about trying to wake us up. At its best, the Orthodox imagination views everything created: people, animals, the whole of the natural world: as a mystery alive with the glory of God, who is himself the greatest mystery and source of all beauty and wonder.

The Nativity by Coptic icon-maker *Isaac Fanous (1991)*

In the Coptic Church, the discipline of fasting is yet another means of waking our sleeping souls a little. The meat and dairy-less fasts of Lent and Advent might seem austere to a bumbling Anglican, but there are good biscuits waiting for us on the other side: Ghorayebah and Egyptian Petits Fours, as well as Kakh: essentially a type of butter cookie filled with dates or figs or nuts. I did think about having a go at making some myself before buying this box of them from a Middle Eastern specialty supermarket near Baker Street. I couldn’t find date or fig ones which would have been my first choice, but took a punt on these Kakh with Malban (Egyptian Turkish Delight) made in Cairo by Egyptian biscuit company BiscoMisr:

The Kakh in the BiscoMisr box came separated in ones and twos in plastic compartments with packets of sugar for dusting. I’ve found out since that it’s natural for Kakh to crumble at the slightest pressure. And these ones crumbled spectacularly, not just into fragments but into a sort of biscuit dust which made eating them elegantly quite a challenge. “Not a biscuit for dipping!” remarked the friend I was taste-testing them with and she was right. The buttery flavour was pleasant but some of them could have done with a bit more of the sweet filling, as you can see from the picture below. “They might be good with coffee,” another friend suggested at a gathering at the weekend “but I’d only give them 4 out of 10” (although this relatively low score didn’t stop him going back for another one). As I’ve carried on eating them, however, I’ve grown to like them better, especially the ones with the citrus-flavoured Malban. Although they’re really meant as festive biscuits they are a handy size for work coffee breaks (and yes, probably better with coffee than tea).

The dustiness and crumbliness of the BiscoMisr Kakh reminded me of the desert fathers and mothers whose adventures with God in the Egyptian desert helped to lay the foundation for the great monastic movements of the Middle Ages. Henri Nouwen’s The Way of the Heart is a beautiful reflection on their influence and retells the story of Antony of Egypt (251-356), the Coptic Saint whose feast day is later this month. Famous for his life of asceticism and solitude, as a young man Antony sought to detach himself from the world in order to attach himself to God. His friend and biographer, St. Athanasius depicts him alone in the desert wrestling with demons. It seems the demons – imagined by Nouwen not as devils with pointy horns but as a host of addictions, fears and compulsions – became much realer to Antony in the desert. But God became realer too, until after twenty years he emerged with a new inner freedom.

I suspect Nouwen chose his title, The Way of the Heart, because so often this is also the Way of the Desert. “Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart…” Moses tells the people of Israel. Moralists like to talk as if our experiences of emptiness, renunciation or deprivation are valuable aids in strengthening character but they’re also a way of exposing the character that is already there. The desert reveals the true condition of it. If there is any bitterness, pollution or debris in the soul – any flash of ego or mixture of motives – it will show it up. The Bible teaches us that the heart is the wellspring of life so if we want what flows from our hearts to be life-giving, we need to be willing to allow God to help us heal them where they are not healthy, and purify them where they are not pure.

And the moral? Like the great feast after the great fast, or the singing after the silence (or like the Malban at the centre of the Kakh), if God sends you into the desert, he will look after you there. And even if you’ve landed there without his invitation, like a depressed and depleted Elijah, he can still meet you in it. On his return from the desert, “the place of great struggle and great encounter,” Henri Nouwen writes: “Antony took his solitude with him and shared it with all who came to him. He had become so Christlike, so radiant with God’s love.”

“Who is this coming up from the desert, leaning on her beloved?” Song of Songs 8:5. Credit: Danielle Bilen

Further Delectation

More on Coptic Christmas in Egypt and outside it, and on the history of Kakh and a recipe for making them.

More on icons and icon-making: “Hope and Fragility: An Interview with Coptic Iconographer Stéphane René from Orthodox Arts Journal.

More on Antony and the Desert Fathers from Bishop Erik Varden as part of a new podcast, The Desert Fathers in a Year.

More on Henri Nouwen’s The Way of the Heart.

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.