More on Easter Food

I wrote in my last post about some horrific Easter food, here’s some of the good stuff.

My son-in-law is a great cook and several years ago he decided he was going to branch out into bread. Here’s the challah bread he made this year for Easter. Over the years he has talked about the Blessing of the Easter food, which takes place every year on Easter Saturday. I have never attended this ritual, at times because noon on the day before Easter Sunday didn’t work for me, but mainly because I saw it as an ethnic custom.

This year I decided I wanted to ex-perience it for myself, so I attached myself to Ron and the kids. Yes, it is ethnic, but not just Polish as I had thought. I saw many parishioners of Italian and other European origins, all of them with large baskets containing the food that was to be eaten the next day. It was fun to peek into the baskets—lots of kielbasa and ham, decorated eggs, wine and various cakes. Some people had flowers in their baskets, some had embroidered cloths covering their food and while some attendees had candles in the basket, we even saw one illuminated by LED lights!

All the baskets lined the aisle and the priest said a prayer over each and gave it a hearty sprinkle of holy water.

Here’s another colorful offering. Ron says that next year he is going to make his bread with the eggs in it as in these little rolls.

I think I will accompany his family again. Food has always been an integral part of Easter and the blessing can only make the meal more meaningful (though I don’t think it will work with for chocolate bunnies with red frosting and plastic faces.)

This is a No-No

I have posted this avocado-hued photo of an Easter gone-by before (I really loved that wallpaper, but glad it went shortly after this.) The kids look—well, like kids— but the star of the show was the lamb cake. Back then, however busy I was, I always made a lamb cake, pouring the batter into the bottom half of the cake tin, wiring the top half on it and trusting that I had the right amount of batter to give the lamb all its legs and its cute face without bursting through the joints in the tin. The illustration that came with the tin showed a lambkin with white curly frosting all over and a wreath of flowers piped on its head. I never quite reached those heights, but my fleeces were always suitably white, even if the jelly bean eyes gave the animal an appearance of being cross-eyed. If I felt really creative I dyed shredded coconut green to give him his piece of verdant pasture.

It has been a while since I tried to duplicate my earlier efforts. I thought lamb cakes had gone out of fashion, but as I was leaving the grocery store today, look what I saw.

This nasty attempt at a lamb cake had a whitish fleece, but a scary plastic face. There were chocolate lambs with pink fleeces. There were scarlet lambs and yellow lambs. Nary a wreath of flowers or anything that could be found in nature.

This is so wrong. Next year I think I will pull out my trusty mould and return to simpler days.

SOAS and SSEES

Do you have an author you found at some point in your life, read avidly and then forgot about or did not for some reason keep track of?

Such a writer for me is Margaret Drabble. I recently read her name somewhere or other and remembered how much I had enjoyed her early books. There always seemed a little more of a connection than that—she was born a few months before I was, we sat for the Newnham entrance exams at the same time (she got in, I didn’t. In fact, she got “a starred First.” I don’t even know what a starred First is, though I can guess. I wouldn’t have come within a mile of one.) After graduation while I was studying the Philosophy, History and whatnot of Education, she was writing and publishing her first book. So I took a trip to the library, took out what they had and reserved some more.

The first book I read was The Pure Gold Baby. When I got to page eight, I came across this passage.

“Jess came from an industrial city in the Midlands and had graduated from a well-regarded grammar school via a foundation course in Arabic at a new university to a degree at SOAS. SOAS! How magical those initials had been to her as a seventeen-year-old when she first heard them, and how thrilling and bewitching they were to remain to her, even into her late middle age! The School of African and Oriental Studies, situated in the heart of academic Bloomsbury.” The whole page brings back memories of a part of London I too have such happy memories of. And while this is a sidebar  to my post, I found that this this book contained so many connections with my life: mention of Potters Bar and Waltham Abbey and the location of the “special” school she chose for her daughter Anna—Enfield, where I grew up and in particular Enfield Lock where my paternal grandparents lived and where my father grew up.

It was the reference to SOAS that grabbed me. Just a few days earlier I had been poring over my “University of London, B.A. Examination for Internal Students: 1962 Pass List”.
looking for the name of someone I knew. As I leafed through the document I noticed there were about two pages of English graduates and about two pages of French. About one page of students graduated in German, less than half a page in Spanish and six students in Italian. Each student had his college printed after his name—Bedford, Westfield, University  College, King’s College and so on. History and Geography followed the same pattern. Lots of History.

What really stood out was the one student who received a degree in Hausa, with SOAS boldly printed after his name. And the six students from the same college with degrees in Swahili. Where did these students come from? Was the one Hausa student the son of missionaries? I doubt any of the grads would have been accepted into their degree programs without first showing some proficiency in the language. SOAS also gave us one Classical Arabic degree, seven Classical and Modern Literary Arabic degrees, one Persian, four Chinese and three Japanese degrees.

The other outlier, SSEES, or the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, graduated eleven students with degrees in Russian.

So, what is my point? My strength has always been languages and no-one ever told me that it would be possible to get a degree in a language more esoteric than the four I knew. (Not to mention the fact that the mainstream college, University College, seems to have taught Scandinavian languages, Dutch and Hebrew.) Would I have been a good student of Hausa?  Swahili? I will never know, but I can’t help thinking that I would have been as excited as Jessica, for whom “SOAS  was a sea of adventure, of learning, of cross-cultural currents that swept and eddied through Gordon Square and Bedford Square and Russell Square.”

Footnote: just as I was about to publish this post, I received an e-mail from my daughter, linking to the book review she had written for her professional association. I guess Robert Frost made my point  better than I could! So did she.