Author Archives: John Cutrone

Mar 01 2024
Book of Days Calendar, Spring, St. David's Day

Welsh Cakes, & Your March Book of Days

And now it is March, and nearly spring, and since it is very late at night, I will make this short and sweet: Here is your printable Convivio Book of Days Calendar for March. It’s an astonishingly busy month: the vernal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, plus Ramadan and Holi and Easter and all the minor holidays that generally come with March. The first of them comes today: It is St. David’s Day, sacred to Wales. It’s a day for leeks and daffodils, but even better: Welsh Cakes:

W E L S H   C A K E S

It’s not uncommon to find recipes for Welsh Cakes that call for regular granulated sugar, butter, and nutmeg, but the traditional recipe will add lard to the mix, use caster sugar in place of the regular sugar, and will be flavored with the more mysterious flavor of mace. If you want the best Welsh Cakes, stick to the traditional version. If you can’t find caster sugar, make your own: pulse regular granulated sugar in a blender until very fine. Do not use powdered confectioners’ sugar, which has added corn starch.

3 cups all purpose flour
½ cup caster sugar
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground mace
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons lard
6 tablespoons butter
¾ cup dried currants
2 eggs, beaten lightly
3 to 4 tablespoons milk
granulated sugar

Whisk together the flour, caster sugar, baking powder, mace, cinnamon, and salt in a mixing bowl, then work in the butter and lard with your fingers until the mixture has the texture of course crumbs. It’s ok if some larger chunks of butter remain. Mix in the currants. Add the beaten egg, working it into the mixture, adding just enough milk to form a soft dough that is not too sticky. Wrap; chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes or until you are ready to make the cakes.

Turn the dough out onto a floured board and roll to a thickness of about ¼”. Using a biscuit cutter (scalloped, if you have one), cut into rounds. Gather up any remnants to roll out again and cut more cakes.

Heat a lightly buttered skillet (cast iron works great) over low to medium heat, cooking the cakes until each side is lightly browned (about 3 to 4 minutes… if they’re cooking quicker than that, lower the heat). Let the cakes cool for a minute or two, then set each in a bowl of granulated sugar, allowing sugar to coat both sides and the edges. Best served warm, split, with butter and jam, or, for a more savory treat, with cheese and leeks, at a table set with a small vase of daffodils.

SHOP OUR SPRING SALE!
Winter is quickly melting into spring and at our online catalog right now, you may use discount code BLOSSOM to save $10 on your $85 purchase, plus get free domestic shipping, too. That’s a total savings of $19.50. Spend less than $85 and our flat rate shipping fee of $9.50 applies. Traditional Easter goods from Germany have been arriving, and new fillable handmade paper eggs should be on our website by Monday.  CLICK HERE to shop; you know we appreciate your support immensely.

A STORY FOR WINTER
Before Winter completely melts away, here is a short bedtime story for a chilly night that I recently read for Stay Awake: Bedtime Stories for Kids & Sleepy Adults, from the Jaffe Center for Book Arts. It’s called “The Magic Porridge Pot,” and you’ll find this story (Episode No. 11) and nine others in the Stay Awake Library at the Jaffe Center’s Vimeo Channel. If you like what we do there at Stay Awake, please consider following the series on Instagram @stayawakebedtimestories … I do love this storytelling project, and it would be awfully nice to see the project get to a hundred followers, at least! Thank you!

Image: Our cover star for this month’s calendar is a painting called “Springtime, Harlem River” by Ernest Lawson. Oil on canvas, circa 1900 – 1910 [Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons].

 

Feb 13 2024
2 Comments
Ash Wednesday, Carnevale, Lent, Shrove Tuesday, Valentine's Day

Pancakes, Heart & Soul

The Pancake Bakery

It’s a mid-week in mid-February and here come a couple of multi-faceted, multi-ceremonial days. It’s Tuesday today to begin with, and an extraordinary one at that: It is Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Mobile and Key West, and in Venezia, it is Martedi Grasso, and both the French and the Italian translate to Fat Tuesday. This is a movable celebration based on the timing of Lent, which is based on the timing of Easter, which is based on the timing of the full moon that comes with or after the Vernal Equinox. Tonight, the festivity of Carnival concludes. But for most of us, those of us who are far from the cities that celebrate Mardi Gras, tonight is simply a time to eat pancakes or crepes for supper, for the day is also known as Pancake Tuesday, and Shrove Tuesday.

Shrove Tuesday concludes Shrovetide, which is the time we’ve been in for several weeks now: the time after Christmas ends and before Lent begins, and there are many traditional foodways for Shrove Tuesday, even beyond the delectable pancake. Polish bakeries will have pączki today, a rich filled doughnut, and Germans will be making doughnuts, too, for this night they call Fasnacht: this night (nacht) before the fast. And in Sweden and Finland, you’ll find semlor on the table: buns scented with cardamom and filled with almond paste and cream. Our friends at Johan’s Joe, the Swedish coffeehouse in West Palm Beach where Seth and I have been known to buy a semla or two, tell us that originally semlor were made only for Fat Tuesday, or Fettisdagen, but nowadays Swedes bake semlor for all the Tuesdays of Lent. Traditions are living things; they do evolve.

How celebratory for a Tuesday to have pancakes for supper! But no matter if you are eating pancakes tonight, or doughnuts, or semlor, the idea behind all these things is the same. To clear the larder of the things that, traditionally, were not to be consumed during the Lenten fast, and in years past, this was a fairly extensive list (much more so than it is today): no eggs, no meat, no lard, no milk, no cheese, no sugar… no nothin’. And it was not just on Fridays; it was for the full forty days of Lent. When our ancestors fasted for Lent, they really meant it. Lent was forty days of beans and pulses and vegetables and fish and absolutely nothing fun. The Italians certainly understood this. Their traditional symbol for Carnival was a jolly plump fellow called il Carnevale Pazzo: Crazy Carnival. He’s usually seen dancing and playing a mandolin while a necklace of sausages dangles around his neck. But Lent brings la Quaresima Saggia: Wise Lent. She is thin and gaunt and somber. Head cast down, pensive, she is dressed in rags and carries a rope of garlic and dried cod.

It is il Carnevale Pazzo who tucks us into bed tonight on Shrove Tuesday, and in the morning, la Quaresima Saggia is the one who wakes us up, and when she does, we awaken to Ash Wednesday, the first day of our 40-day Lenten journey. Lent these days, it must be said, is no big sacrifice. Some folks give up sweets for Lent, or give up booze, or give up gossiping. All the Church asks is that we be more prayerful and more penitent and give up meat on Fridays. As a kid, for me this meant a season of fish sticks for supper on Fridays, or lentil soup without the sausage. Which was all fine with me. I was the sort of kid who ate anything that was put on my plate, no questions asked. Lucky for me, though, I was born in an age where fish sticks on Fridays met the obligatory sacrifice for Lent, and no one took away my eggs and cheeses and desserts. That would be a real sacrifice.

And then sometimes, like this year, St. Valentine runs headlong into la Quaresima Saggia, and therein lies a dilemma for young lovers who find themselves seated at fancy restaurants for an amorous Valentine’s Day dinner, debating whether they should have the fish or the lentil soup… or the Boeuf Bourguignon cooked to perfection. We may find ourselves sitting there, wondering WWJD (What Would Julia (Child) Do?).

I am not “old” but I am older, and Seth and I have more sense than to dine out on Valentine’s Day. One of our favorite Valentine’s Day celebrations was take out Thai noodles, picnic-style on a blanket on the floor, while we watched A Room with a View on DVD. This year, our niece is coming to dinner and she doesn’t eat meat, anyway. She won’t even realize it’s a ceremonial night of sacrifice when I put a bowl of Pasta Fagioli in front of her. It is an experiment, mind you: She’s not terribly adventurous when it comes to food, and this will be her first encounter ever, I am told, with the mild yet delectable cannellini bean. My hope is she will love cannellini beans and my version of Pasta Fagioli––cavatappi with those creamy white beans, infused with garlic and drizzled with fresh olive oil, seasoned just right with freshly-ground salt and pepper. Where love takes root, we say, let it grow. Especially on Valentine’s Day (and especially one combined with Ash Wednesday).

 

ONLINE SPECIALS: A COPPERMAN’S DAY SPECIAL, PLUS A VALENTINE SALE!
You’ll find our newest Copperman’s Day print and all our Copperman’s Day prints now at our our online catalog when you CLICK HERE. Order 5 or more of any of our mini prints (Copperman’s Day prints, B Mine Valentines, and our famous Keep Lake Worth Quirky prints) and use the code COPPERMAN when you check out; we’ll take $5 off your order to help balance out our flat rate domestic shipping charge of $9.50. (And if you ordered Copperman’s Day prints last week, when we were first announced them, worry not! Your orders should ship out tomorrow.)

If you’re doing more serious shopping (and we do have lots to offer if you are), you may instead use discount code LOVEHANDMADE to save $10 on your $85 purchase, plus get free domestic shipping, too. That’s a total savings of $19.50. Spend less than $85 and our flat rate shipping fee of $9.50 applies. Newest arrivals: Letterpress printed Valentine cards in the Valentine section, and check our Specialty Foods section for some incredibly delicious chocolate we found from Iceland, including a particularly Icelandic blend of milk chocolate and licorice. If you love both these things, well… Icelanders long ago discovered that covering black licorice in milk chocolate, then dusting the result in licorice powder, is just amazing. (Trust me: we’re on our third bag so far.)  CLICK HERE to shop; you know we appreciate your support immensely.

Image: “The Pancake Bakery” by Peter Aertsen. Oil on Panel, 1560. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

Feb 09 2024
2 Comments
Chinese New Year, Losar

Year of the Wood Dragon

The new moon is in the sky now and Chinese Lunar New Year has begun, and so has Losar, the new year in the Tibetan tradition. This new year in both traditions is the Year of the Wood Dragon. Dragon is the fifth of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, and here is how that came to be: When the Jade Emperor announced that the order of the zodiac animals would be determined by when they each arrived at his palace, Rabbit figured, “I’ve got this in the bag!” Rabbit knew he was fast, and he was pretty proud of his speed. Some (Ox, especially) might say Rabbit was even a little arrogant about it. Rabbit in particular made fun of Ox, who was his neighbor, for Ox, though he took great strides, was mighty slow compared to Rabbit.

On the day of the Jade Emperor’s race, Rabbit set off at daybreak. Sure enough, he was the first to arrive outside the Jade Emperor’s palace. But Rabbit hadn’t counted on having such a tough time crossing the river, which made him a bit tired, and so, as none of the other animals were in sight, he opted to have a little snooze while he waited for the others to catch up. And so Rabbit took a nap under a tree just outside the gate. Which is all well and good, I suppose… but while Rabbit slept, three other animals arrived and entered the palace. Ox was one of them, but ahead of Ox came Rat, for Rat had tricked Ox into giving him a ride and leapt off of Ox and into the palace first. Ox followed in, and behind Ox came Tiger. Only after Tiger’s entrance did Rabbit awaken from his nap… and this is how Rabbit came to be the fourth animal of the Chinese Zodiac and why Rat is first, and why Ox is second, and why Tiger is third, ahead of the rabbit.

Next came our dragon, who soared gracefully into the palace as he descended from the clouds. The Jade Emperor was perplexed as to how Dragon had not come in first in the race, for Dragon certainly had the advantage of flight. But Dragon explained: he was delayed on his journey through the sky for he could see, from his high vantage point, a fire burning in a farmer’s field, and so Dragon stopped to help the farmer by bringing rain to extinguish the fire. And, though Rabbit didn’t realize it, Dragon also stopped along the way to help Rabbit in his travails by blowing him across the river safely to the opposite shore. Touched by the dragon’s kindnesses, the Jade Emperor welcomed him in as the fifth animal of the zodiac.

The snake, the horse, the goat, the monkey, the rooster, the dog, and the pig all followed the dragon, but this year is Dragon’s year, and the element associated with Dragon this year is wood, and it’s the first Wood Dragon year since the year I was born. If you are a fellow Wood Dragon, our characteristics are: Introverted (check), not terribly enthusiastic (that doesn’t describe me at all), not so great with relationships (I don’t think that describes me, either), and despite our introverted nature, we tend to do quite well when thrust into the limelight (and that does, oddly enough, describe me: I can do pretty well on a stage or speaking to a large group of people, even though all I want to do, up to the moment the light shines on me, is run away).

Dragon is the most unusual of the Twelve Animals of the Zodiac in that he is the only mythological animal. In the West, we historically have considered dragons dangerous and frightening, but I prefer the Eastern view of dragons as helpful, beneficial, and lucky creatures to have nearby. That may just be my inner dragon speaking. Perhaps it’s another quality of Wood Dragons? I tend to approach the world with curiosity, rather than with fear. That may be a character flaw, but it’s so far served me well.

Speaking of fear: Many Chinese Lunar New Year traditions come out of an ancient legend in which a monster called Nian would come out of hiding as each year came to a close, and Nian’s favorite thing to do at the end of the year was to scare people. But the good people discovered that there were three things that scared Nian: the color red, the bright lights of illuminated lanterns, and the loud crackling of burning bamboo. All three of these things are part of the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration. Red is the color of good fortune, lanterns illuminate the night time sky, and the burning bamboo is now replaced with firecrackers. But let me tell you something: Seth and I, just a few weeks ago, thinned out one of the stands of bamboo growing in our backyard and we had so much cut bamboo in piles in the yard that one cold night this winter, we decided to have a little bamboo bonfire in the copper fire bowl. We had never burnt bamboo before. It burns with astonishing and amazing pops, as each inner chamber heats up and explodes. Each and every loud POP made us both shriek. Even a half hour in, when it was pretty obvious this would be happening, each new POP made us yell out. We couldn’t stop laughing. And it’s pretty obvious now, as Chinese Lunar New Year begins, that these loud pops would scare off a monster like Nian.

Last year at this time, Seth and I made homemade dumplings for the new year celebration. They were so good, but I am sick right now with a cold and I don’t know that I have it in me to make homemade dumplings this time around. But who knows, for the new year celebration continues on through Lantern Festival, when the full moon returns and the celebration concludes. That is on the 24th of February this year. That’s two weeks of red, two weeks of illuminated lanterns, two weeks of potential dumpling making, two weeks of firecrackers and popping bamboo. Enjoy!

 

ONLINE SPECIALS: A COPPERMAN’S DAY SPECIAL, PLUS A VALENTINE SALE!
You’ll find our newest Copperman’s Day print and all our Copperman’s Day prints now at our our online catalog when you CLICK HERE. Order 5 or more of any of our mini prints (Copperman’s Day prints, B Mine Valentines, and our famous Keep Lake Worth Quirky prints) and use the code COPPERMAN when you check out; we’ll take $5 off your order to help balance out our flat rate domestic shipping charge of $9.50.

If you’re doing more serious shopping (and we do have lots to offer if you are), you may instead use discount code LOVEHANDMADE to save $10 on your $85 purchase, plus get free domestic shipping, too. That’s a total savings of $19.50. Spend less than $85 and our flat rate shipping fee of $9.50 applies. Newest arrivals: Letterpress printed Valentine cards in the Valentine section, and check our Specialty Foods section for some incredibly delicious chocolate we found from Iceland, including a particularly Icelandic blend of milk chocolate and licorice. If you love both these things, well… Icelanders long ago discovered that covering black licorice in milk chocolate, then dusting the result in licorice powder, is just amazing. (Trust me: we’re on our third bag so far.)  CLICK HERE to shop; you know we appreciate your support immensely.

 

Image: The Fire Dragon Dance for Chinese Lunar New Year, photographed on the First of February, 2003. Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons, attributed to this source in China.

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