Soul Cakes

I’m departing from my usual topics for reflection this morning because of an article I read about modern bakers trying to re-create a medieval recipe for Soul Cakes. Most of the problem seemed to be that the recipes on record from that time have no quantities listed, or instructions on baking times or methods of preparation. One writer said this about a recipe from 1604: “However, it doesn’t give us the quantities—nor does it tell us how long to bake it. So you have to work out for yourself what to do with the ingredients.”

I believe this is evidence of an enormous paradigm shift. Lately, much of my theological and devotional reading makes reference to the medieval mind-set; their ways of understanding the world. I think this is a perfect example. Reading between the lines a bit led me to reflect that modern sensibilities are no longer intimately connected with the natural world. Medieval cooks knew where all their ingredients came from, and how they behaved in relation to cooking methods. They had culinary ‘perfect pitch,’ which meant that they could taste something and ‘play it by ear,’ so to speak, when cooking it themselves.

I was moved to remember a time when I baked cookies as gifts for people at Christmas for several years running. A lot of cookies, and a lot of different kinds of cookies. After a while I no longer needed a recipe to bake a basic cookie. I just knew how. I knew how various ingredients went together, and how they acted when put in the oven. I could tell when they were done by the aroma in the air. I knew which kinds of dough needed to be chilled by how greasy it felt. I knew which doughs were better rolled out and cut, and which were more happy to be plopped out of a spoon. I also— and this is important— figured out that the estimated quantities on the recipes in my cookbook were always wrong (you know, the part where it says “makes 2 dozen cookies”) and I began to be able to estimate final quantities off the top of my head, and assemble my ingredients based on how many cookies I wanted to end up with. In the end, I was making cookies without measuring anything. I would just put in “about this much” flour, butter, sugar, spices, chocolate, nuts, or whatever, and feel confident that my cookies would come out the way I wanted them to.

The point of all this is that all I would have needed, to bake a kind of cookie that I had never baked before, was exactly the kind of recipe that the authors of the article were complaining about: a simple list of ingredients. To be fair, though, those medieval cooks had eaten soul cakes plenty of times and they knew how they tasted, so that would have made it a bit easier for them to figure out how to bake them from nothing more than a bare list of what to put in them. Here is that 17^th century recipe for soul cakes:

“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 together & make it in little cakes & so bake them, if you will you may put in some saffron into them or fruit.”

Now, I suppose I’d better get to the point and explain where I’m going with this. I think the way we approach our day-to-day lives in the modern world is deeply damaged by a lack of understanding of, and connection to, the natural world. I remember an experience of mine that illustrates this perfectly: it was a Girl Scout outing in which I took a bunch of 9-year-olds on a nature walk and utterly shocked, disgusted, and appalled them by picking an apple off of a tree, polishing it on my shirt and taking a bite. The universal response from the girls was, “EEEEWWWW!”  I asked them where they thought apples came from, and they said, “the grocery store.” What’s more, they refused to believe that the apples in the store came from trees; that someone picked them, washed them, packed them in boxes, and sent them off in trucks to be delivered to the grocery store.

They absolutely refused to accept it!

Writers like Tolkien and C.S. Lewis understood this on a deep level. There is an account in the third book of Lewis’s science fiction trilogy, That Hideous Strength, which describes how Merlin does his work:

“He is the last vestige of an old order in which matter and spirit were, from our modern point of view, confused. For him every operation upon Nature is a kind of personal contact, like coaxing a child or stroking one’s horse. After him came the modern man to whom Nature is something dead—a machine to be worked—and taken to bits if it won’t work the way he pleases.”

Perhaps it was the name “Soul Cakes” that stirred something in me to ponder the deep and immutable Oneness that simply Is, regardless of what mortals say or think.

In that Oneness, flour, sugar, and butter hold the awareness of the whole web of plant and animal life that they arise out of, and will return to—once they have been combined, heated, and transformed—having done their dutiful and joyful work alongside the humans that coaxed them into forms that feed us and give us delight.

In that ‘operation upon Nature’ the whole of Creation manifests itself; reveals itself. Matter and Spirit are indeed One, and not in a farfetched and fanciful manner of speaking. This Oneness does not stop us from being pragmatic, or making necessary distinctions between one thing and another. It would be silly to act as if there was no need to think in terms of ‘either-or’ when certain choices must be made.

It’s just that ‘either-or’ is not a universal model to follow in understanding how the world works. ‘Either-or’ is great for choosing the right size wrench; or for deciding how big a mortgage to get; or for woodworking projects in which it’s a good idea to “measure twice and cut once.”

‘Either-or’ is NOT great for deciding how to act towards each other! Human relations break down when we divide along ‘either-or’ lines—lines such as Legal or Illegal; Citizen or Immigrant; Conservative or Liberal; Christian or Muslim; Gay or Straight; Right or Wrong.

Oneness rises from below

and falls from above.

In it we take our place

among all creatures.

It works in us our perfect duty

and our delight.

It brings us to the plain light of day

where we walk in the wind.

It darkens our nights

under the moving clouds.

It calls to us to bury our hands deep

in the living ingredients of the world—

Knead them, coax them,

and bake them into Soul Cakes.