From a Lenten Moon to Bad Man’s Bridge

Via Easter Food Folklore, A Figgy Sunday Recap, Herb Pudding and Sowing & Grafting

Hello Dearest Gentle Reader

Can you believe it is nearly Easter?  Spring is all around us and we have just enjoyed a glorious full Lenten moon.  Do I sound a little bit like I am writing for an almanac? I hope not too much.  I am just enjoying the glory that is nature and the transition into a new season.  What can I say, I’m a woman who enjoys the liminal, which perhaps explains my love for Autumn and Spring and a tendency to sulk through the summer.  I’m friendlier towards winter than summer because of a natural love of hibernating, a flaw which people are more likely to tolerate during the cold weather. 

I felt the need to write to you about some Easter food traditions but I’m not touching the origins of the Easter festival with a bargepole. I am going to remain aloof from the controversy, firm in my beliefs that I am right. I will also be sharing my Easter menu, mostly because I want to encourage other people to tell me about what they are planning for what is, even if you don’t have a spiritual bone in your body, a four day weekend pretty much devoted to food for most of the UK. There doesn’t even have to be presents for this one although I will be providing one in the form of a folktale later. 

Let's start with those food traditions, there aren’t lots I didn’t cover last year but the few we have are pretty cool. We have however missed Figgy Sunday again. Or rather, I missed the chance to remind you all.  I actually ate half a packet of fig rolls with a big mug of tea and a book about Persephone which I think counts as a celebration or at least a fusion ritual at the very least. You can probably tell from this that I don’t give up delicious things for Lent but I’m at least slightly sure that fig rolls count as some sort of medicinal food anyway. I’d blame my age for my enjoyment of their slightly damp sweetness but this is not a recent change of taste. They were always my second favourite after a Fox’s Ginger Cream.

Anyway, to tradition. We’ll start with eggs, but not the chocolate ,although I am awfully excited about the pistachio one I have ordered. These are eggs that are laid by actual hens on Good Friday which are believed to remain as fresh as the day they were laid for a year. If that isn’t enough, eggs laid on this day were said to have the power to extinguish all fires they were thrown into. Which is handy, but I would also recommend a small fire extinguisher as well, just in case .

Bread baked on Good Friday is imbued with a myriad of good qualities but this year, I’d like to draw your attention to its pest control properties. Apparently three of the day’s loaves placed in a heap of corn would deter ‘rats, mice, weevils or worms’. 

One last thing, it was considered unlucky to refuse any figs offered to you on Good Friday since it was believed that Christ was crucified on a cross made from the wood of the fig tree. 

If you are looking for something more savoury you could consider buying some cow peas and cooking them up as cooking these on Good Friday was considered lucky. Another traditional food on this day was Herb Pudding, recipe below from Florence White’s Good Things in England. It celebrates the green shoots of Spring and the touch of bitterness found in the leaves is symbolic of the cold  winter left behind. 

If the closest you fancy getting to the kitchen is to toast some M&S Hot Cross Buns and apply lashings of butter but you love the garden then I’m pleased to say that some folklore beliefs favour Good Friday for plantings and grafting. Sowing peas and beans should be done on this day, and so should the grafting of apple trees, this was once particularly common in Herefordshire. This is also the only day you should even think of moving parsley around the garden. 

Right that brings us to Easter menus, I am using this long weekend as a celebration of Spring and this means Spanokopita with lots of spinach, green herbs and feta, lemony garlic dressed potato salad and Isle of Wight tomato & red onion salad on Friday or Saturday and on Sunday (look away now vegetarians and vegans) slow roasted shoulder of lamb with dauphinoise or Italian roast potatoes with steamed purple sprouting broccoli with miso garlic dressing. I will be using up leftovers on Monday with shawarma style wraps with leftover lamb, houmous, falafel, halloumi, olives and pickles. The rest of the week will essentially be leftovers of leftovers of leftovers in a Inception like chaos of meals. I can’t wait.

What are your plans? Are you planning meals for friends or just snacks to fit in around the Easter eggs?

I promised a present didn’t I, so here you go: 

The Devil's Bridge adapted from Welsh Fairy Book - W. Jenkyn Thomas

One day Megan of Llandunach stood by the side of the river Mynach feeling very sorry for herself.

The Mynach was in flood, and roared down the wooded valley in five successive falls, tumbling over three hundred feet in less than no time. Just below the place where Megan was standing, there was a great cauldron in which the water whirled, boiled, and hissed as if troubled by some evil spirit. From the cauldron the river rushed and swirled down a narrow, deep ravine, and if Megan had been in another state of mind and had an eye for the beauties of nature, the sight of the seething pot and the long shadowy cleft would have made her feel joyous rather than sorrowful.

But Megan at this point in time cared for none of these things, because her one and only cow was on the wrong side of the ravine, and her thoughts were centered on the horned beast which was cropping the green grass carelessly just as if it made no difference what side of the river it was on. How the wrong-headed animal had got there Megan could not guess, and still less did she know how to get it back.

As there was no one else to talk to, she talked to herself. "Oh dear, what shall I do?" she said.

"What is the matter, Megan?" said a voice behind her.

She turned round and saw a man cowled like a monk and with a rosary at his belt. She had not heard anyone coming, but the noise of the waters boiling over and through the rocks, she reflected, might easily have drowned the sound of any footsteps. And in any case, she was so troubled about her cow that she could not stop to wonder how the stranger had come up.

"I am ruined," said Megan. "There is my one and only cow, the sole support of my old age, on the other side of the river, and I don't know how to get her back again. Oh dear, oh dear, I am ruined."

"Don't you worry about that," said the monk. "I'll get her back for you."

"How can you?" asked Megan, greatly surprised.

"I'll tell you," answered the stranger. "It is one of my hobbies to build bridges, and if you like, I'll throw a bridge across this chasm for you."

"Well, indeed," said the old woman, "nothing would please me better. But how am I to pay you? I am sure you will want a great deal for a job like this, and I am so poor that I have no money to spare, not even a penny"

"I am very easily satisfied," said the monk. "Just let me have the first living thing that crosses the bridge after I have finished it, and I shall be content."

Megan agreed to this, and the monk told her to go back to her cottage and wait there until he should call for her.

Now, Megan was not half such a fool as she looked, and she had noticed, while talking to the seemingly kind and obliging stranger, that there was something rather peculiar about his foot. She had a suspicion, too, that his knees were behind instead of being in front, and while she was waiting for the summons, she thought so hard that it made her head ache.

By the time she was called for, she had however hit upon a plan. She threw some crusts to her little dog to make him follow her, and took a loaf of bread under her shawl to the riverside.

"There's a bridge for you," said the monk, pointing proudly to a fine span bestriding 114 feet of yawning chasm. And it really was something to be proud of.

"H'm, yes," said Megan, looking doubtfully at it. "Yes, it is a bridge. But is it strong?"

"Strong?" said the builder, indignantly. "Of course it is strong."

"Will it hold the weight of this loaf?" asked Megan, bringing the bread out from underneath her shawl.

The monk laughed scornfully. "Hold the weight of this loaf? Throw it on and see. Ha, ha!"

So Megan rolled the loaf right across the bridge, and the little black dog scampered after it.

"Yes, it will do," said Megan. "And, kind sir, my little dog is the first live thing to cross the bridge. You are welcome to him, and I thank you very much for all the trouble you have taken."

"The silly dog is no good to me," snapped the stranger, very crossly, and with that he vanished into space.

From the smell of brimstone which he had left behind him, Megan knew that, as she had suspected, it was the devil whom she had outwitted.

And this is how the Bad Man's Bridge came to be built.

I am going to leave you with a photo of the home made hot cross bun that is my pride & joy. A beauty from the one and only batch I ever made. Lockdown was responsible for a lot of strange things. I have returned to the comforting bosom of M&S buns ever since, you never truly appreciate something until you can’t have it.

I must now bring this letter to a close. Please don’t hesitate however to get in touch via the comments via any of my social media profiles/my website . If you have enjoyed this and would like to read further such nonsense and have not yet subscribed, please don’t hesitate to subscribe for free at the button below. You’d be very welcome and it would be a joy to write to you.