Posted on by Elizabeth Evershed

Alfajores

Regular readers of the bestiary may have noticed a gap in coverage when it comes to South America, the only continent we’ve not yet visited on our tour of the biscuit-eating world. I’ve been wanting to write about a Latino biscuit for a while now and what better species to begin with but the Alfajor? To my delight I found they were being sold in not just one, but two, establishments right up the road from me. Yes, my Peckham neighbourhood has no less than two Argentinian cafes along the foodie-fare that is Lordship Lane, each of them selling traditional and novelty Alfajores.


So what is an Alfajor, I hear you ask… These amazing sandwich biscuits are a cornerstone of South American cuisine and the product of a complex culinary journey from eighth-century North Africa to medieval Spain to early modern South America in the wake of the Moorish and then the Spanish empire-building that took place over the medieval and Renaissance periods. Centuries after they reached South America in the sixteenth century (in the conquistadors’ saddlebags?) the Argentinians added a special twist to their Alfajores in the form of the Dulce de Leche filling. Different regions and countries of South America continue to develop their own versions of this popular biscuit. They are so popular in Argentina they even have their own national day.

Chacarero was the name of the first cafe I visited way back at the beginning of Advent and they sell both the traditional Maicena Alfajores and Brownie, Coconut, and Chocolate-Orange and Hazelnut flavoured ones, all with the Dulce de Leche filling. After I’d waxed lyrical about Alfajores as a food group, my friend Gill and another friend who remembered them from her time in Peru went on an expedition to Lordship Lane and brought me back a novelty gingerbread-flavoured one. ¡exquisito! I ventured out there the next day and bought three others before trying Chango a little further up the street on the other side. I bought two more modern chocolate versions from the latter before treating myself to a coffee in their cafe and was touched by their generosity when the staff brought me a free traditional Alfajor to have with it. These biscuits are so rich, even for a seasoned biscuit-eater, one really is enough for one sitting, but it was a lovely treat with my cappuccino. I’ve never come across a sandwich biscuit this soft and sweet before. I’d first hit on the idea of writing about Alfajores on seeing they were the December recipe on this year’s Bake Off Calendar, but these felt more authentic than anything I could have baked.

Alfajores de Medina Sidonia are still made in Andalusia today and seem radically different to the South American versions, so much so that there is some debate whether South American Alfajores are in fact related to the biscuits first mentioned in Spanish texts after the Fall of Granada, the ones made with breadcrumbs, nuts, honey and spices. The best explanation I could come up with is that the first were the inspiration for the second and more of a creative adaptation than a direct translation into South American culture. I learned from British-Argentinian chocolatier Sur’s blog that different Alfajor recipes have their own followings in Argentina and while they are appreciated all year round, they are traditionally eaten at Christmas.

The name alfajor comes from the Arabic al-hasu meaning “stuffed” or “filled” and this reminded me of one particularly poignant line from the Virgin Mary’s Magnificat, her song in praise of God recorded in Luke’s gospel at the time of her visit to her cousin Elizabeth: He has filled the hungry with good things. (Interestingly, any public display of the Magnificat was banned in the 1980s by the Argentinian military junta after the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo placed it on posters in the capital. Mary’s declaration that God acts to cast down the proud and exalt the lowly clearly touched a nerve.) We often think of Christmas as a wonderful time of giving (and it is) but theologically speaking, it is a more wonderful time of receiving in which the abundant fullness of the Alfajor serves as a reminder that we’re blessed when we come to God with our lack.

And here we touch on something of the mystery of the Incarnation. These themes of riches and poverty, fullness and emptiness, come together most strikingly in the Christmas story. The twentieth-century German theologian Helmut Thielicke, one of the few who dared to preach against the doctrines of the Nazis, said that the story of Christ’s birth is like a melody of two parts: the lower register expressing the humbleness of Jesus’ origins as a Jewish baby with no better place to be born than an outer room which doubled as an animal shelter on account of the crowding in Bethlehem where his mother and her fiancé had been forced to travel for a Roman-imposed census. But in the line above, to borrow a sentiment from commentator Gary Roth: “angels sing hallelujahs. Hallelujahs that remind us that whatever the sadness, despair or hopelessness felt on Earth, there is also this upper register where the angels still sing over our lives and heaven remains open.”

St Paul wrote movingly of Christ as the fullness of him who fills everything in every way and of the grace that so motivated the son of God that he became poor for our sake so that through his poverty we might become rich. Because in the final analysis, as the story of the Incarnation shows, all we have to offer God is our poverty. Every blessing we receive, material or spiritual, comes from Him: the one who joyfully exchanges our emptiness for His fullness and our rags for His riches.

Further Delectation

A BBC Good Food recipe for Alfajores if you’re brave enough to have a go at making some (or, to carry on the South American theme, some Mexican hot chocolate!)

Some gorgeous embroidered Opus Anglicanum tapestries of the nativity which was famous for needlework in Europe in the high middle ages.

Some music that’s almost as revolutionary as the Magnificat…


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Posted on 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 by Elizabeth Evershed

Jammie Dodgers

Way back at the beginning of the second lockdown I found myself craving Jammie Dodgers. As luck would have it they were on special at the local supermarket, but it had been so long since I’d bought them I was surprised to find their appearance and branding had undergone a bold cosmetic change. You can still see the old swirl-top pattern I remember in this recent article by Rachel Cooke, which confirms my view that many are turning to comfort biscuits in these trying times. In sympathy with the zeitgeist, the design now resembles a spillage at a jam factory. Still, these ones look very pleased with themselves sat on a plate in my new digs:

The company who make Jammie Dodgers, Burton’s, have been producing them in one form or another since the late 1940s. One — possibly apocryphal — story links them with Roger the Dodger of the long-running Beano comic. When I researched them further however, I found that the same biscuits have been in the news this year for distinctly un-comical reasons and we may find them in even greater demand this festive season if the Delivery Workers Guild goes ahead with its strike. So even comfort biscuits haven’t managed to dodge the shadow of 2020, it seems…

‘We listen to the evening news with its usual recital of shabbiness and horror, and God if we believe in him at all, seems remote and powerless, writes Frederick Buechner. But there are other times – often the most unexpected, unlikely times – when strong as life itself comes the sense that there is a holiness deeper than [the] shabbiness and horror and at the very heart of darkness a light unutterable.’ The apostle John might have agreed with him: The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it, he writes in the prologue to his gospel, written in the glow of the extraordinary life of his friend Jesus of Nazareth.

BL Oriental MS 5024 f. 19r

Light overcoming the darkness is also the message of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, which begins this evening with the lighting of the first candle of the Menorah. Another apocryphal story tells how the Jews took back their temple after the Greek King Antiochus IV captured it in around 164 BC, desecrated the holy places, and made every effort to stop them practising their religion. At the re-dedication of the temple they only had enough of the consecrated oil to last for one day but the supplies miraculously stretched for seven until the new oil could be ready for burning. John gives us a glimpse of Jesus celebrating the festival in winter walking in Solomon’s Colonnade, a long pillared walkway not unlike a medieval cloister.

‘What if God became a human and lived with us?’ is the question John sets out to answer and you can read his gospel and the other gospel accounts of Jesus’ life or watch this recent TV adaptation if you want to know more of what happened along the way. I’ll admit I’m more than a little biscuit-obsessed these days, but to me the heart in the centre of the Dodger’s new splat speaks of the wonder of the Incarnation: of God looking on us with compassion in all our pain and confusion, horror and shabbiness, and sending himself as a human right into the heart of the mess.

BL Harley MS 4382 f.139

Further Delectation

Have a read of the Beano’s biscuit jokes (straight out of the Christmas Cracker school of humour) or have a go at making your own festive Jammie Dodgers.

Help support essential workers this Christmas. Let delivery companies like DHL know you’d like them to look after their drivers better. Ask your MP to support a pay-rise for NHS staff. Or consider whether you could help those on the frontlines of the food poverty crisis.

Prepare for Christmas with this medieval homily and meditation from the Clerk of Oxford’s modern counterpart. Listen to a beautiful twenty-first-century rendition of one of the oldest, loveliest hymns on the incarnation:

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.