Mar 01 2023
2 Comments
Book of Days Calendar, Spring, St. David's Day

Zippin’ Into Springtime, or Your March Book of Days

It’s St. David’s Day, and the Welsh will be donning leeks and daffodils on their hats and lapels today, and there will be Welsh Cakes served with butter and jam or with leeks and cheese. I am more the butter and jam sort. St. David, sacred to Wales, brings in March, a month of transition as winter officially gives way to spring. It is a month of many saints’ feast days that are sacred to particular countries: after St. David and the Welsh, we can look forward on the 5th to St. Piran’s Day for the Cornish, St. Patrick’s Day on the 17th for the Irish, St. Joseph’s Day on the 19th for the Italians, and then there’s St. Urho’s Day on the 16th for the Finns. St. Urho, who drove the grasshoppers from Finland: known only in the lands where Finns have settled. It’s a good story if there ever was one.

It’s an interesting month, March is, and here is your Convivio Book of Days Calendar for it. A printable PDF, as usual, and a fine companion to this blog. This month’s cover star is “Early Spring in Åsgårdstrand,” painted by Edvard Munch in 1905. You might admire the painting while enjoying a nice Welsh Cake today. Here’s our recipe:

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.

COME SEE US!
We’ve got two springtime pop-up shops in the works. At each, you’ll find our full selection of handcrafted artisan goods for Easter and Springtime from Germany, Sweden, and Ukraine, plus a few other surprises, too.

Find us first at the DELRAY BEACH ST. PATRICK’S DAY PARADE & FESTIVAL in Downtown Delray Beach on Saturday March 11. Our Convivio Bookworks tent will be at Old School Square, 51 North Swinton Avenue, from 1 to 7 PM. Next, on Saturday April 1, we’ll be at JOHAN’S JOE in Downtown West Palm Beach from 7 AM to 3 PM for a little Springtime Market that Johan’s Joe and Convivio Bookworks are hosting together. We had a Christmas Market last December and it was so much fun and we met so many wonderful people, we’ve decided to collaborate again for Easter.

Meanwhile, at our online catalog, save $10 off your purchase of $85 or more, plus get free domestic shipping, too, when you use discount code BUNNY at checkout. It’s our Zippin’ Into Springtime Sale, good on everything in the shop, now through Easter (and probably a bit beyond, too). What’s new? Some great new handcrafted artisan goods for Easter from Germany, plus a new supply of real pysanky eggs and wooden crucifixes from our friend Kyrylo Cherniak in Ukraine. It took almost a whole year for him to gather these things from the artisans he works with throughout Ukraine, and it is our deep privilege and honor to bring them to you. Kyrylo, so far, is safe and as well as can be. We have some new paper mache egg containers and splint wood baskets on their way from Germany, too, which should be arriving any day. We’re about to load about two or three dozen new hand embroidered tea towels made by my mom onto the website, too. Millie’s Tea Towels: you love them, and Mom loves making them for you! CLICK HERE to shop! And don’t forget to use discount code BUNNY at checkout if your order is $85 or more.

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus! Happy St. David’s Day!

 

Image: “Early Spring in Åsgårdstrand” by Edvard Munch. Oil on canvas, 1905. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

 

Feb 21 2023
Ash Wednesday, Carnevale, Lent, Shrove Tuesday

Carnevale Pazzo & Quaresima Saggia

 

We are firmly on the approach to spring. The Carnevale of Venice, with all its passion and opera and high baroque fashion and masks, began in earnest over two weeks ago. The celebrations come to a close tonight with Martedi Grasso: Fat Tuesday… Mardi Gras. Stateside, the celebrations culminate tonight in New Orleans and in Key West and in Mobile, Alabama, the places where Mardi Gras is an old friend. For most of us Americans, though, the day doesn’t get a second thought as to its specialness, although many of us will be celebrating by making pancakes for supper. Shrove Tuesday is the proper name for this final day before the start of Lent, and we eat pancakes tonight to use up the last of the eggs, the last of the milk, the last of the butter. In Germany, and for the same reasons, it is Faschnacht, or Fasnacht, a night for homemade doughnuts. 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, 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.

Lent these days 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. As a kid who would eat anything put in front of him, I didn’t mind, and Lent never felt like a sacrifice. In ages past, though, this abstinence from meat was not just on Fridays but for all the forty days of Lent, and it was not just meat but also eggs, cheese, milk, and lard. Lent was forty days of beans and pulses and vegetables and fish.

It’s been said, though, that even without this fast enforced by the Church, Lent would have had to have been invented, out of necessity. It was not all that long ago that food was a much more locally produced commodity, and by late winter, food stores would be at their lowest supply. If the populace was going to make it through the winter to the first fresh foods of spring, some abstinence was going to be necessary –– whether by order of the Church or by the simple fact that by late winter, there’s only so much food to go around.

The contrast between the Carnival season and the Lenten season could not be more pronounced. The season of excess typically began with Christmas and its Twelve Days and resumed again with Carnevale (and in some places, where Carnevale would begin right after Epiphany, just continued on without a break). In Italy, the symbol for Carnevale is a plump and jovial fellow, dancing and having a grand old time, well dressed, plume in cap, and often wearing a ring of sausages around his neck. He is called il Carnevale Pazzo: Crazy Carnival. He rules the roost all through the Carnival season and through this culminating night of celebration on Fat Tuesday. Come Wednesday morning, though, there is a distinct shift and a new figure takes center stage: she is 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. Her reign begins on Ash Wednesday, and she treads barefoot upon the discarded masks of Carnevale. She is known, too, as la Vecchia: the old woman.

Seth and I, we will eat our pancakes tonight with festivity and in good spirit, and in the morning, if we have it in us, we will approach that altar to have ashes smeared on our foreheads with the spoken reminder: Remember man that thou are dust and to dust you shall return. We are made of the stuff of this earth and we shall return to it. But the stuff of this earth is made of the stuff of the stars, too, and that is something to ponder. If nothing else, these forty days that follow tonight’s pancake supper will hopefully remind us that life is short, and we would do well to live the time we have with compassion and kindness for our fellow human beings, and to love each day, and, as we like to say here, to live the ceremony of each day, too.

 

 

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Feb 05 2023
5 Comments
St. Agatha's Day

Don’t Blush, but Today is St. Agatha’s Day

My sister and I were chatting on the phone yesterday morning and during the call, she remembered it was time for Minne di Vergine, the pastries made once a year for St. Agatha’s Day. I had forgotten. It’s been a busy, hectic Saturday, but here I am late Saturday night, past midnight, gathering some thoughts for you in an essay for the day. It’s a bit of writing taken from past chapters on St. Agatha’s Day, mixed with some new things I’ve learnt over the years… but at this late hour, there’s not enough time to give you a brand new chapter without denying myself a full night’s sleep, so please, take this as it is –– cobbled together –– with the blessing, I hope, of Sant’Agata.

Type the Italian word minne into Google Translator and ask it to translate to English and you may get exactly what I got: minne –– the same word, repeated. Google did not see fit to translate such a word. But we’re all adults here, so I will translate for you: the word minne is the Italian equivalent of any number of English slang words for breasts: boobs, tatas… you can take your pick from a very long list. This all brings us to one of the oddest days in the seasonal round: St. Agatha’s Day, when Sicilian bakeries prepare a once-a-year sweet delicacy known as Minne di Vergine –– Virgin’s Breasts –– pastries that were invented by the nuns of Catania for us to savor with our espresso.

Saint Agatha, or Sant’Agata in Italian, lived in Catania in Sicily in the third century; she is sacred to those places, especially to Catania. The pastries are made from sponge cake with a mound of sweet ricotta cream on top, covered in marzipan and dotted, just where you would expect it to be, with a cherry. You may blush as you eat them, but the pastries come from the story of Agatha’s martyrdom for her faith: The Roman governor of Catania became enthralled with Agata’s beauty. Agata, however, one of the secret upstart Christians in town, had taken a vow of chastity to protect her virginity. The Roman governor would have none of it, though, and continued his advances. Agata continued to reject him to protect her faith… and for this she was sentenced to death by the governor. He had her killed in a gruesome manner that it pains me to describe for you. Yet I fear I must… for it’s the only reason these delicious Minne di Vergine make any sense: he had Agata’s breasts severed before roasting her above a bed of live coals. I told you it was gruesome.

The story is not for the faint of heart. But at its heart is a strong woman who did not back down and who did not surrender her principles and who stood up to a man, and that is pretty powerful stuff, especially in the year 251. Sant’Agata is now patroness of Catania. She is invoked for protection from breast disease as well as from volcanic eruptions. It was the nuns of Catania who began baking the confections that we enjoy each Fifth of February, something they’ve been doing for centuries. It’s part of what makes Catholicism so incredibly fascinating, especially in Italy. Marzipan pastries in the shape of breasts made by Catanese nuns? This is probably a big part of what makes Protestants so nervous around us Catholics, even to this day. We are a somewhat dramatic people.

The celebration in Catania has been going on for a few days now, but it all culminates tonight with processions through the city of large carriages and spectacular candelore––enormous towers with lit candles depicting scenes from St. Agatha’s life. The candelore are paraded and danced through the streets of Catania to shouts of “Evviva Sant’Agata!” by men in full costume, the towers hoisted upon their shoulders. (Again, not for the faint of heart.)

Tradition would have us eat never just one minna, but always two: since breasts come in pairs, so it goes with these pastries. So that means each person eats two minne, two pastries… so even this is not for the faint of heart.

I love when there are literary connexions to the foods we eat, and my Italian professoressa, Myriam Swennen Ruthenberg, should she be reading this, might be thinking now of a famous scene in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel Il Gatopardo (The Leopard, in its English translation) in which Don Fabrizio looks over a vast table of Sicilian desserts that include these Minne di Vergine, the breasts of St. Agatha. He asks for some and receives them (two, no doubt) and he beholds them on his plate. He thinks of the famous paintings of St. Agatha presenting her own severed breasts on a plate. He asks, “Why ever didn’t the Holy Office forbid these puddings when it had the chance?”

And so today I hope you can find at an Italian bakery some Minne di Vergine. You don’t need to blush when you order them; just point, perhaps whisper the word “minne,” pay and go. Be sure to order them in pairs.

If you prefer to make your own Minne di Vergine (or are too embarrassed to ask for them at your local Italian bakery), here is a recipe for Minne di Vergine that we’ll be trying next chance we get. The photograph of the pastries was shot in Catania and is by Stefano Mortellaro, 2005 [Creative Commons] via Wikimedia Commons. The photograph of the statue of Sant’Agata comes to us thanks to my Sicilian friend Luisa Mangano-Johnson. Grazie mille, Luisa!

SHOP OUR VALENTINE SALE!
Spend $85 across our catalog and take $10 off, plus get free domestic shipping, when you enter discount code LOVEHANDMADE at checkout. That’s a total savings of $19.50. Click here to start shopping. We’ve got some wonderful new handmade artisan goods from Mexico, as well as brand new handmade Murano glass dipping pens and lovely writing papers from Italy. Your purchases at conviviobookworks.com translate into real support for real families, small companies, and artisans we know by name. We all appreciate your support!

 

 

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