Medieval Biscuits – 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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Wishing you a joyous Epiphany (and Twelfth Night, if you celebrate it). Some parts of Europe celebrate it on the night of the 5th of January but the feast itself falls on the 6th in the Church of England’s calendar, which, coincidentally, is also National Shortbread Day, so here are a few epiphanies about this wonderful biscuit…

Around the fifth Day of Christmas, we uncovered a box of shortbread. To quote my sister, “I don’t know where they came from or who brought them; I just started eating them,” but the packet did say these were baked in Scotland which was promising. I’ve read somewhere you aren’t allowed to sell shortbread with less than 50% of butter in the shortening (an archaic term for the fat content) north of the border and still call it that, “All-Butter” being the gold standard. Like gingerbread, shortbread comes with a medieval history: there’s evidence this quintessentially Scottish biscuit was produced as early as the twelfth century although Mary Queen of Scots and her French cooks were thought to have developed the recipe to its current state of perfection in the sixteenth. According to Walkers of Speyside, it “was originally reserved for celebrations such as weddings, christenings and for family gatherings at Christmas and Hogmanay.” Not that this packet made it that far as my brother-in-law nabbed the last one early on NYE…

Scene from the Hours of James IV of Scotland, c.1500

It also sounds a suitable biscuit for consumption on Twelfth Night, which in Britain used to be celebrated more than now. Kings and queens, or ‘lords of misrule’ were appointed to preside over the festivities, a special kind of fruit cake was eaten, wassailing (ale-drinking and carolling) undertaken, and entertainments like plays and mummings were popular. I’m afraid we have Queen Victoria to blame at least in part for those traditions disappearing after the 1800s, but the earlier pattern was for an abstemious Advent in December followed by a January that was… joyful. Now the twelve days of Christmas are rarely marked in full and our Januarys can feel so somber it often seems like the calendar has been turned on its head.

The most brilliant of the Makars, whose flowering of poetic creativity coincides with the development of shortbread in late medieval and early modern Scotland (no coincidence, surely?) understood all too well how tough the dark winter days can be. I’m particularly fond of the mercurial, melancholic William Dunbar: a cleric attached to the household of James IV. Amusing the court with dramatic entertainments on occasions like Twelfth Night was one of Dunbar’s lighter duties and one he excelled at, but despite being the cause of great laughter in others he wrote feelingly about his own low spirits in winter:

“Into thir dirk and drublie dayis
Quhone sabill all the hevin arrayis
With mystie vapouris, cluddis, and skyis,
Nature all curage me denyis
Of sangis, ballattis, and of playis…”

In these “dark and cloudy days”, even “songs, ballads and plays” can’t cheer him up, he says, vexed as he is with “heavy thought” on every side. “Yit quhone the nycht begynnis to schort / It dois my spreit sum pairt confort.” (Yet when the night begins to shorten, it brings my spirit some comfort.)

Scottish terrier greeting Welsh sunlight with an English human (out of shot).

I hadn’t realised until I came to research it that the word ‘short’ in shortbread refers not to their size or fat content but their crumbliness: a short biscuit (or cake, or pastry) is one that is friable – i.e. something that breaks easily. I’ll admit I hesitated to write about this as a desirable quality in a biscuit until I looked beyond the breaking to connect it to the bread part. Bread in the bible is a symbol of spiritual as well as bodily nourishment and in the breaking of it we are reminded of the fellowship of the early Christians, who had all things in common, but most of all perhaps of the body of Christ broken for us.

God never promises us that this breaking wouldn’t be unsettling, but to quote Leonard Cohen, the cracks may be how the light gets in (or sometimes how it gets out). To the weary and wary alike, the stories we celebrate in Epiphany speak of a heavenly reality breaking into our world like a light does: in the story of the wise men who discovered a king worthy of all other kings’ worship, and of that same king, now a grown man living a humble life in the backwaters of Nazareth, rising up from the waters of baptism to hear a voice from heaven telling us this is God’s beloved son.

Jesus’s baptism, by artist Dave Zelenka (2005)

The curious semantics of the shortbread reminds me of another moment of revelation which feels both familiar and mysterious somehow. Two puzzled and grieving disciples journeying along the road to Emmaus fall in with a stranger who helps them make sense of what had happened to a loved, lost friend. Stopping for a meal together, they finally recognise the same friend in the person of the stranger teaching them about the role of the Messiah, but their eyes are only opened to see him at the breaking of bread.

After everything 2021 threw at us, you may not expect much joy from your January – or 2022 as a whole – this year, but I hope and pray that however distant joy seems you are surprised by it. And whatever kind of news is breaking, whatever burdens you may be carrying (or still carrying) in the days to come, may you find that king-friend-stranger walking with you on the journey and know him in the breaking of bread.

Further Delectation

Apparently Twelfth Night still survives in the West Country, God bless it. With all that excellent cider it had to be the home of wassailing… Click the link above to read more about Old Twelfth Night on the 17th of January. (If you’re especially keen, it also has a Wassail recipe here.)

A blog post on the history of shortbread with yummy recipes from the British Food blog written by Dr Neil Buttery (yes, that is his name, I kid you not…)

A beautiful reflection on Epiphany from the Digital Nun, whose wisdom I have much appreciated over the years.

Not specifically about Twelfth Night, Epiphany or shortbread, but my friend Olivia alerted me to this post on Bread, Cake and Biscuits by the gentle author of the Spitalfield’s Life blog which is well worth a read if you have the time.

Looking for some quality Twelfth Night entertainment? This fun clip of Mark Rylance (as Olivia) and Stephen Fry (Malvolio) in the Globe’s 2013 production of Shakespeare’s play for the Inns of Court might add a little levity to your evening (performed in early modern fashion with men taking women’s roles):

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