Stirring up Cattern Cakes & Community ~ for Celtic Advent.

The Sunday before ‘Church Advent’ begins is always Stir-Up Sunday, and this year that fell on 22nd November. I wrote all about Stir-Up Sunday last year and you can read that post here if you would like to. 

Stir-up Sunday, which has become associated with the making of Christmas puddings and cakes, in fact takes its name from the opening words of the collect of the day in the 1594 edition of the ‘Book of Common Prayer’; ‘collect’ being the name for a short prayer that gathers up the theme for a particular day in the Christian liturgy; 

“Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” 

Medievalist Eleanor Parker, who writes as ‘A Clerk of Oxford’, tells us that “Several Advent collects begin with the Latin verb 'excita', which means 'rouse, excite, stimulate'. The translation 'stir up' has a nice energy about it, but a medieval English prayer offers the translation 'Egg' (as in 'egg on'), which also has a pleasing culinary flavour…” 

Indeed, a translation of an Advent collect from Worcester Cathedral begins, “Egg our hearts, Lord of Might”, which brings us beautifully to another meaning of ‘Stir-Up Sunday.” 

Because the ‘stir-up’ prayer came with the specification that it "shall always be used upon the Sunday next before Advent”, and, as most Christmas pudding recipes require the pudding to be kept for several weeks to mature before eating, it acted as a fine reminder that the time had come for pudding making; which certainly brings a different meaning to ‘bringing forth the fruit of good works’! 

And there were other interpretations of the day too. Victorian schoolboys, who were excited by the thought of the imminent Christmas holidays, took the day as an invitation to ‘stir it up’ by pinching and poking one another. We are told that ‘Crib Crust Monday’ and ‘Tug Button Tuesday’ offered similar opportunities to the rosy-cheeked schoolboy, with ‘Pay-off Wednesday’ being the day to repay small grudges in playful fashion! 

The Sunday before Advent is now more usually celebrated as ‘The Feast of Christ the King’, which was first celebrated in 1925, and so I thought that I would share this poem by Malcolm Guite, which warns us against the consumerism so deeply woven into the modern lead-up to Christmas; 

Christ the King 

Matthew 25: 31-46 

Our King is calling from the hungry furrows 

Whilst we are cruising through the aisles of plenty, 

Our hoardings screen us from the man of sorrows, 

Our soundtracks drown his murmur: ‘I am thirsty’. 

He stands in line to sign in as a stranger 

And seek a welcome from the world he made, 

We see him only as a threat, a danger, 

He asks for clothes, we strip-search him instead. 

And if he should fall sick then we take care 

That he does not infect our private health, 

We lock him in the prisons of our fear 

Lest he unlock the prison of our wealth. 

But still on Sunday we shall stand and sing 

The praises of our hidden Lord and King.

(Malcolm Guite) 

As an antidote to that consumerism Stir-Up Sunday invites us to gather with our families around the kitchen table and stir wishes into sweet puddings and cakes. That many of us are unable to do that this year even if we should want to is difficult indeed. 

Last year, I ended my blog on Stir-Up Sunday with a promise to invite my neighbours to the hedgehermitage kitchen this year to stir our pudding mix. But, of course, that too has not been possible with Covid-19 so present in our every day. Imagine then my delight when I visited the gathering place of the Little Church of Love of the World community (of which more on another day), the Wild Goose Collective, on the evening of Stir-Up Sunday to find an array of sharings informing me that many of our number had taken the opportunity to bake Cattern cakes, the traditional food of Catterntide, which falls on 25th November. As I had been doing the same, and as Catterntide is almost with us. I thought that I would share my recipe for Cattern cakes, which is based on an almost unchanged Tudor recipe and comes from the legendary ‘Cattern Cakes and Lace: Calendar of Feasts' by Julia Jones and Barbara Deer. 

This is my third year of making them and they are always delicious. You can read about last year’s Cattern cake-making adventure here. 

As last year, I recommend the use of an ancestral 1970s apron and gorgeously garish carboot sale rolling pin, but if you don’t have those you can proceed with what you have. Cattern cake recipes are very forgiving.

Here's the recipe. 

Ingredients: 

9oz self-raising flour (sieved) 

1/4 tsp ground cinnamon ~ I use 2 tsp and add some more later on, but I do have a great love of cinnamon. I advise bold experimentation. 

2oz currants 

2oz ground almonds 

2 tsp caraway seeds ~ or, as with the cinnamon, add a bit more. 

6oz caster sugar 

4oz melted butter 

1 medium egg, beaten 

Extra sugar & cinnamon for sprinkling

The recipe can be easily adapted for different dietary requirements. For example, Jan Blencowe of the Wild Goose Collective swapped the self-raising flour for Paleo flour with a heaped tsp of baking powder, substituted flaked almonds for the ground almonds, and used powdered stevia rather than caster sugar.

Method: 

Sieve the flour into a bowl and mix in all the other dried ingredients. 

Add the melted butter & beaten egg and mix to form a soft dough. I also added a tiny bit of warm water. 

Don't forget to lick the spoon!

Roll the dough out on a floured surface until you have a rectangle, approx 10 x 12 inches. 

Brush the rolled out dough with water and then sprinkle with cinnamon (lots!) and sugar. 

Gently roll, as you might for a swiss roll. It doesn't need to be too tight. 

Cut into approx 2cm wide slices and pop on a baking tray, leaving space in between to allow them to spread a little. Bake in an oven preheated to 200°c/Gas Mark 6 for about 10 minutes, or until golden and crispy on the top. Mine took about 25 minutes! Bask in the loveliness as your house fills with the smell of spices and good things. 

Remove your cakes from the oven & pop on a wire rack to cool. You can sprinkle on some more caraway seeds at this point, and even more sugar & cinnamon if liked. 

Once cool, they can be stored in an airtight container for up to 7 days but I can almost guarantee that they won’t last that long. Although I made a large batch of Cattern cakes on Stir-Up Sunday I have already had to make more so that I have some for Cattern Day on Wednesday! 

Traditionally, these cakes would be enjoyed with a 'hot pot' mixture of rum, beer, and eggs, but, so far at least, we have stuck to tea here in the hedgehermitage. Absolutely lovely too. 

Do let me know if you decide to make them.

As for stirring wishes into the mix, this Stir-Up Sunday I chose wishes for creativity,  community, love, and fierce resistance to the dying of the Light. In the year ahead I will do all I can to make sure that my wishes come true.