A tradition, a conflict, and a resurrection challenge...
This Halloween, with a Chicago snowstorm outside, I set out to resurrect something long vanished. With a bottle of brew, a handful of spices, and an ancient manuscript, I set out my tools and began.
I was going to make soul cakes.
Over a year earlier, I had stumbled upon a challenge put out by the Records of Early English Drama, an international initiative of theatre historians, based at the University of Toronto. Since I watch a bit too much of the Great British Baking Show, a technical challenge sparked my interest. The Soul Cake Bake challenged people around the world to recreate a lost baked good tied to the 16th century tradition of Souling, and the age-old conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism in England.
Before either of these religions arrived in England, the island’s inhabitants practiced their indigenous religions, until the Romans arrived, suppressed those religions, and introduced their own, including Mithraism and early Christianity. When Rome embraced Christianity, the religion took hold in England as well. Finally, in 597 CE, Augustine of Canterbury arrived on the island with a mission from the Pope to establish the Catholic Church there. Yet, just as in many other parts of the world, indigenous traditions survived by melding into Christian practices. The origins of traditions such as souling and mumming go back at least to the Middle Ages, but perhaps even farther.
Souling was one in a family of traditions involving performing song, music, or small theatrical skits in return for food or money. On November 2nd, All Soul’s Day, 16th-century northern and western English revelers would go “a-souling” door to door. In return for their performance, their neighbors would give them soul cakes. The gift of a soul cake had three benefits: charity for the poor performers, the good work of giving charity, and the redemption of souls from purgatory, hence soul cakes.
One souling song went like this:
“Soul, soul for a souling cake
I pray you, missis, for a souling cake
Apple or pear, plum or cherry
Anything good to make us merry
Up with your kettles and down with your pans
Give us an answer and we'll be gone
Little Jack, Jack sat on his gate
Crying for butter to butter his cake
One for St. Peter, two for St. Paul
Three for the man that made us all”
(Shropshire: Bye-Gones Relating to Wales & the Border Country (1889–1890), 253)
A similar tradition dedicated to St. Katherine on her saint’s day, November 25, saw women “demanding ‘soul’” from neighbors and putting on mumming performances. As early as the 14th century, people would buy food and drink on John Mirk’s Festival and “deal” it to the needy to help their loved ones out of purgatory. With these traditions tied to Catholic saint veneration and ideas about purgatory, they faced an uncertain future when a certain king decided to split from the Catholic Church.
King Henry VIII, yet to be famous for his string of wives, attempted to annul his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in 1533. With the Pope refusing to break the rules for him, Henry broke with the Pope, declaring himself head of the Church of England. Yet unlike other more radical Protestant movements in Europe, Henry’s new Anglican Church did not depart too far from Catholicism in practice. Only later did the rift deepen.
By the 1600s, despite the fervor of Protestant reformers, traditions like souling had survived. In his 1623 play Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act II Scene I, Shakespeare wrote of “a beggar at Hallowmas,” the evening before All Souls’ Day. And it was a tenacious tradition: even in the mid-1800s, some older women still gave out soul cakes.
Yet not everyone was pleased about these traditions. One Protestant pamphlet writer, Philip Stubes, complained in 1593 about the blasphemy of what he renamed “foole-cakes for all souls daie.” Nevertheless, a handful of recipes survive, while the tradition itself morphed into today’s trick-or-treating.
The basic recipe used by the Soul Cake Bake was recorded around 1604 by Lady Elinor Fettiplace in her household book. As a woman from a prominent Tudor family, with an unexpected level of education for a woman, she was easily in a position to give out soul cakes to neighbors in need. Nevertheless, as most recipe writers did at the time, she neglected to give the precise instructions that modern readers now expect.
“Take flower & sugar & nutmeg, & cloves & mace & sweet butter & sack & a little ale barm, beat your spice & put in your butter & your sack, cold, then work it well all to gether & make it in little cakes & so bake them, if you will … you may put some saffron into them or fruit"
For my modern kitchen, I turned to several recipes other Soul Cake Bake contestants had proposed, as well as this recipe from NPR, for suggestions. And though the flavorings and fruits can vary, I had to figure out what “a little ale barm” would do to these cakes. Ale barm, the foam scooped from fermenting beer, was an easy way of acquiring yeast for making leavened breads and cakes, especially for households with home brew or a nearby brewer. After consulting with the amazingly helpful chief brewer at Greenstar Brewing in Chicago , I tried a Samuel Smith Old Brewery’s Apricot Ale, a sweet English ale brewed with apricot. Most importantly, this beer is bottle conditioned: brewed and bottled with live yeast. This gave me the best chances of approximating live, fermenting ale barm. (Next time, I plan on trying one of Greenstar’s brews, when they reopen after our 2020 shelter-in-place order, and trying a few more trick in future posts.) The technique also leaves plenty of saffron milk, which I used in a batch of muffins with excellent results.
I left out sack in this version, but will be trying to approximate it in my next take. Historically, this sweet, fortified white wine from the Spain or the Canary Islands was similar to a modern light-colored sherry. Feel free to add a bit if you have it on hand!
Substitute any dried fruit you like, and feel free to eyeball the amounts of flavorings. The spices and the saffron-infused milk create a warm flavor, with a maltiness from the beer. Their texture is dense and biscuit-like--a substantial small cake that a friend described as “exactly what I hoped an early modern recipe would taste like” -- in the best way. Try a new-old holiday tradition and hand out some soul cakes to your friends and family next Halloween!
Soul Cakes
Makes 15-20 soul cakes
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
Pinch of saffron
1/2 cup milk
1 stick (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
2 egg yolks
1/2 cup currants or other dried fruit, chopped (I like adding chopped, unsulfured apricots, but Lady Elinor Fettiplace doesn’t specify, so it’s up to you)
1 bottle of bottle-conditioned, sweet English ale (though the whole bottle isn’t needed. The cakes will still taste great if you only have regular beer, but skip the rising option in Step 8, since there won't be live yeast to make it rise)
1 egg yolk, beaten for egg wash
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
2. In a small bowl, mix flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, and salt.
3. Make the saffron milk: Crumble saffron with your hands into a small saucepan and place on a low heat. Keep an eye on the strands, waiting until they become fragrant. Pour in the milk an heat until just hot to the touch. Take off the heat--the milk will be bright yellow.
4. Cream the butter and sugar in medium bowl (I used an electric hand-mixer). Add the egg yolks and mix them in thoroughly with a spoon. Add the dry ingredients and mix. It will be dry and crumbly.
5. For the next step, have the pot of saffron milk and a mug right beside your mixing bowl. Open the bottle of beer and pour it into the mug--you want the foam off the top. Moving quickly, add the milk and beer foam a tablespoon at a time, mixing in between. When the foam collapses, you can scoop up tablespoons of beer too. Keep going, a tablespoon of each at a time, until you have a soft dough. You won’t need a whole bottle of beer or all of the milk.
6. Place your currants or chopped fruit into a bowl and pour a little beer over them to soak (You can’t start this earlier or the foam will be gone before you’re ready for it).
7. Turn the dough out on a floured surface and knead gently, flouring your hands lightly beforehand, until the dough is consistent throughout. Knead in the soaked fruit.
8. Two options:
Continue to step 9 without letting it rise. The results will be more biscuitlike.
Oil a large bowl (I use walnut oil), place dough inside, and put in a warm place to rise for an hour or more. It may not be dramatic, as live yeast in ale barm is unpredictable (hence the world “barmy”).
9. Roll out the dough to a thickness of about ½ inch. Cut out circles--you can use a 2-inch-diameter cookie cutter, or the mouth of a wide glass or mug. Arrange the circles on an ungreased baking sheet. They won’t spread, so they can be fairly close together. Roll the scraps out a second time and cut more circles until you have no dough left. (I made a pumpkin shape out of my last scraps--be creative!)
If you’re feeling ambitious, roll some currants in the egg yolk and press them into the tops of the soul cakes, making tiny patterns. You could make little crosses to invoke All Saints’ Day, or create Icelandic sigils--the one for luck is easy to make, and never a bad thing to have on Halloween.
10. Brush the tops of the soul cakes with beaten egg yolk and bake for 15 minutes. They will be golden and shiny. Soul cakes are delicious when warm, but will keep very well for a week. Microwaving them for a few seconds is never a bad idea either.