It is the end of October, the fields are bare, the leaves have been blown from the trees, and the nights are growing longer. The darkness is coming. At this time of year we celebrate the end of summer and the cycle of death and rebirth. From as far back as anyone can remember, on one special night we gather together to share food and drink, play tricks and games.  It is a time to connect with our ancestors, and honor the dead.

In my home county of Cheshire this gathering has long had a unique name – Souling or Soul-caking. ‘An Appetite for Violets’ begins on Souling Night, a time when mischief is rife and the world can turn upside down. It is 1774 and the household is baking to welcome a band of mummers with blackened faces and outlandish costumes who demand entry at the door and sing:

A soul, a soul, a soul-cake,
Please good missus, a soul cake…’

Later they perform a mumming play in return for food and drink. Just how ancient Cheshire Souling might be is suggested by the ritual of a horse’s head led by a man in a white sheet, a performance called ‘hodening’ thought to be an echo of the Norse god Odin.  Other characters can include a Hero, Saint George or King George, a Blackamoor or Saladin, Kings, Fools, Devils, and a Doctor who magically brings the hero back to life in a way that echoes many rituals of death and renewal.  The rhyming couplets of the play are passed on orally, so characters emerge like ‘Bellsie Bob’, a corruption of ‘Beelzebub’. But then none of it is serious - it’s about slapstick, taunting, and free-flowing beer.

So what are soul cakes and why are they handed out?  Even in the fourteenth century the idea of Soul Cakes was ancient, as John Mirk wrote in Festial ‘wherefore in olden time good men and women would this day buy bread and deal (give) it for the souls that they loved, hoping with each loaf to get a soul out of purgatory’.

In pre-Reformation England these cakes were given to the poor as alms to try to free dead souls from Purgatory. Later, in one of those mixing ups of pagan and Christian traditions, the poor village Soulers conferred a blessing on rich households in return for food and drink - suggesting the rich had better pay up or risk a bad harvest, or worse.

Surviving recipes for Soul Cakes vary, but they are generally small, round, spicy and sweet. Sugar and spice and dried fruit were for centuries the mark of festival food, a welcome relief from bland everyday food. Recipes describe a ‘cross’ design that hints at two crossed bones rather than a crucifix. When I baked them as research for An Appetite for Violets they were quite delicious spiced biscuits. An ancient ‘serving suggestion’ from a pre-literate age was to lay the cakes ‘in a tall heap like the picture of the Shew Bread in the Bible’.

These days a few groups of Cheshire Soulers keep the ritual alive and next weekend I’ll be looking for a performance in local pubs. On Souling Night (or All Hallow’s Eve or Hallowe’en) it seems history does indeed live, in our instinct to walk the streets in outlandish costumes and eat and drink special foods, and bless or curse (trick or treat) our neighbours…

                                   ~ Historic Recipe To Make Soul Cakes ~

Work 4lb fresh butter with your hand to a cream.  Beat in the same of  loaf sugar pounded and sifted fine. Take two dozen egg yolks beaten and add by degrees.  Then put in flour 8 lb with salt, allspice and mace as you wish.  Add your currants 2 lb picked and dried well.  Lay saffron as you have it in a churn of milk and lay next to the fire.  Mix your dough with the warm milk strained and make flat rounds marking each with Crossed Bones in remembrance of Dead Souls.  When done enough in a quick oven lay in a tall heap like the picture of the Shew Bread in the Bible.  All who knock for entry and chant the rhyme may eat from the board to keep the blessings on the house.

 
A MODERN INTERPRETATION OF SOUL CAKES

8oz butter softened at room temperature
5oz caster sugar
2 egg yolks
12 oz plain flour
2 oz cornflour (this makes the cakes shorter)
A pinch of salt
2-3 teaspoons of spices as you have them: allspice, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, ginger
1 teaspoon baking powder
4oz currants

Cream together the softened butter and sugar in a mixing bowl until pale and fluffy. Gradually add the yolks to the mixture.

Sift in the flour, cornflour, salt, spices and baking powder.

Add the currants and mix together with your hands to make a smooth dough. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 180/350/gas mark 4.

Roll the dough out on a floured surface to about ¼ inch and stamp out circles.

Mark with crosses with a sharp knife.

Bake on baking sheets for about 15 minutes until golden.

Remove and cool for a few minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. 

This week it is the ultimate test on the Great British Bake-Off – the grand final between three astonishing bakers, Richard, Luis and Nancy. The challenges have not been announced, but there is little doubt it will involve something very large and architectural. We may think the trend for man-size towers of croquembouche or gingerbread houses you could happily inhabit, are new phenomenon – but as ever, history is merely repeating itself.

In Britain a fashion for sculptural food can be traced back to Medieval Royal feasts and the use of sotelties moulded in the shapes of people, animals, and mythical creatures in wax, marzipan or sugar.  These in-between courses showstoppers were accompanied by texts or verses that revealed their allegorical nature, for example an angel accompanied by a text: ‘Thanke all, god, of this feste’. 

On a more modest scale, the eighteenth century saw the height of elegant sugar architecture. Classical temples, military monuments and ornate gardens were constructed to form the centrepieces of breathtaking banquets. The secret to constructing so many edible buildings was the use of carved moulds that allowed sugarpaste to be ‘mass-produced’ and then assembled. To conquer the inherent problems of food architecture – wobble and collapse – many decorations were not intended for consumption, strengthened by rice flour, plaster, starch and ground marble. Furthermore, to prevent slumping, buildings were often supported by wires and armatures.

By the nineteenth century such ostentatious trionfi di tavola (triumphs of the table) were deemed  excessive. Urbain Dubois, chef de cuisine to Wilhelm I of Prussia, created sculptures that reflected the Kaisers two greatest passions: warfare and hunting. A sculpture depicting the pleasures of the hunt in the form of a boar’s head and miniature stags, made from fat, must be one of the most ghastly food sculptures ever made. More attractive were the huge Gothic sugar centrepieces, such as that recreated by food historian Ivan Day at www.historicfood.com

Looking ahead to the Bake-Off final, it does look as if Richard, master builder by trade and devotee of pencil and ruler, enters with a clear advantage. However, unlike the food sculptures of the past, I hope that ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’ and sheer ‘scrumminess’, as Mary would say, will win the day.

~ How to Make A Solomon’s Temple in Flummery ~

Take a quart of stiff flummery and divide into three parts.  Make one a pretty pink colour with a little cochineal, bruised and steeped in brandy.  Scrape an ounce of chocolate and mix with another part of flummery to make a stone colour.  The third part must be white.  Then fill your mould first with pink flummery for the tower and then white for the turrets.  Fill the base with chocolate flummery and let it stand for one day.  Then loosen it round with a pin and shake it out gently.  When you set it out, stick a small sprig of flowers into each tower, which will strengthen it and also give it a genteel appearance.

Extracted from THE PENNY HEART by Martine Bailey, to be published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2015.

Martine Bailey’s debut historical novel, AN APPETITE FOR VIOLETS, is available now in trade paperback and as an eBook from Hodder & Stoughton. Find out more on the Hodder website here, by visiting Martine Bailey’s website and by following her on Twitter.