To begin with: my apologies. We lost a good friend and mentor in late January, Arthur Jaffe, it was difficult to get back on two feet once that happened. Arthur was a great guy: the type of person we all want to emulate, the type of person who reminds us that it is important to appreciate each day, and that, after all, is what this blog is all about. He was a subscriber to the blog and a believer in it and in me and was looking forward to seeing the Convivio Book of Days as a real book someday, for he was a man who loved books and left a real legacy of them.
And so I missed writing to you about St. Valentine and about St. Agatha and who knows what else. But I was at the Finnish bakery in Lantana the other day, the place packed with tall Finns speaking a tongue I do not understand, and on the top of the cases was something I had never seen there before: round pastries that were bursting with whipped cream. I asked the Finnish woman behind the counter about them. “We make them every February,” she said. “They are filled with almond paste and whipped cream. You should have one.”
She said they were not affiliated with any particular holiday (“No, we just make them every February”), but it was a day or two later, in realizing I had forgotten about St. Agatha’s Day, that I realized the Finns at the bakery were probably tuning into a tradition perhaps long forgotten, for the shape and the filling happens to be exactly like that of the pastries that the nuns of Catania in Sicily make for St. Agatha’s Day, which was on the 5th of February. The story is gruesome (in her martyrdom in the third century, St. Agatha’s breasts were severed) but the pastries are delicious (meant, as they are, to evoke what was lost by the saint) and people have been unapologetic about these things through the ages. Why wouldn’t we bake something like this in February?
I also missed writing to you about Carnevale, and now, today, it is Mardi Gras, its festive conclusion. It is known in some places as Shrove Tuesday, and tradition would have us eat pancakes for supper tonight. Pancakes for supper? Yes, please. That alone is cause for celebration. The idea is it is a supper designed to use up the last of the eggs, the last of the butter, the last of all that was restricted in earlier days as we enter the somber season of lent, which begins tomorrow with Ash Wednesday. It was a matter of necessity as much as of observance in those times, for by this time of year, the stocks of food from the harvest were probably quite depleted. If folks were to make it through to the first harvests of spring and summer, a little restraint now was an important thing.
But that is tomorrow. Tonight, we celebrate. Tonight, we have pancakes for supper, and we remember the importance to love each day.
Image: De Pannenkoekenbakster (The Pancake Maker) by Jan Miense Molenaer. Oil on canvas, 1645 [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.