Category: UK

Wassail: A How-To For New Traditions

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Occasionally people ask me a question like this, “I’d like to do a Wassail. How should I do it? How I can make it relevant to our place?” This year, a friend in the cider world in New York posed this question to me again, and I wanted to share my response for anyone else who might find it useful.

As cider becomes a bigger part of the American scene, people are looking for ways to make some of cider’s seasonal traditions part of our repertoire of events and holiday happenings. Part of what I think makes wassail such fun is that it is already a widely variable tradition and has a lot of interchangeable and adaptable component parts. There is a “choose-your-own-adventure” quality to Wassail, but there are also things that make it recognizable and unique.

There are many details of traditional English Wassails that one can reference – twelve fires, wassail queens, particular songs, the mummer’s play etc – but I think it is more pragmatic to think in terms of generalized essential components, such as:

  • Converge on an orchard or important tree. Feed it some libations. Feed yourself libations.
  • Rouse some spirits / commune with powers of the great beyond manifest in plant form
  • Make lots of noise. Be rowdy.
  • Music and dancing and processing and a bit of folk drama or artistic spectacle
  • Fire. Light up the long night.
  • Feed Everyone well.

Wassail is the act of blessing or a toast, of offering good health to whatever place, person, animal, or plant you plan to visit during the festivities. The visit can be within the farm, the neighborhood, or beyond, but it is the visit itself that counts, the effort to make a special acknowledgement of relationship that is vital to your community. To give some examples of the flexibility of Wassail as a custom, below I show some examples of the breadth of the historical Wassail tradition, followed by some suggestions for planning a new event.

Historical Wassails of Apples, Wheat and Oxen

In historical sources, we find wassail means lots of things, not just a celebration apples. The descriptions we are most familiar with regarding apples often resemble this one from a gentleman in Devon in 1791:

The Wassail of Orchards

Your Hereford correspondent, J. W.’s, account in your entertaining Miscellany, p. 116, of a custom observed in his county on Twelfth eve, induces me to transmit you one not very unlike, which prevails in the other most noted part of this kingdom for cyder, the Southhams of Devonshire. On the eve of the Epiphany, the farmer, attended by his workmen, with a large pitcher of cyder, goes to the orchard, and there, encircling one of the best bearing trees, they drink the following toast three several times :

“Here’s to thee, old apple tree, / Whence thou may’st bud, and whence thou may’st blow ! / And whence thou may’st bear apples enow ! / Hats full ! caps full ! / Bushel ! bushel sacks full / And my pockets full too !

HUZZA !” This done, they return to the house, the doors of which they are sure to find bolted by the females, who, be the weather what it may, are inexorable to all intreaties to open them till some one has guessed at what is on the spit, which is generally some nice little thing, difficult to be hit on, and is the reward of him who first names it. The doors are then thrown open, and the lucky clodpole receives the titbit as his recompence. Some are so superstitious as to believe that, if they neglect this custom, the trees will bear no apples that year. Yours, etc., ALPHONSO

Gomme, The Gentleman’s Magazine LibraryLibrary: Being a Classified Collection of the Chief Contents of The Gentleman’s Magazine from 1731 to 1868, Vol 3 16-17.

Some of the early accounts describe a wassail of the wheat fields with bonfires. John Brand, antiquarian and rationalist Protestant cleric, first documented Wassail customs in his book Observations on Popular Antiquities – Including the Whole of Mr. Bourne’s Antiquitates Vulgaris with Adenda to Every Chapter of that Work published in 1777 as an annotation of his predecessor Henry Bourne’s (1694-1733) work. In the annotation of Henry Bourne’s work, this description of Wassail occurs in a note on section devoted to harvest suppers, showing a visit to a wheat field that bears many of the same component parts of the orchard Wassail:

The Wassail of Wheat Fields
Mr. Pennant informs us, that a custom prevails in Gloucestershire on the Twelfth-day, or on the Epiphany in the Evening: All of the Servants of every particular Farmer assemble together in one of the Fields that has been sown with Wheat; on the Border of which, in the most conspicuous or most elevated Place, they make twelve Fires of Stray in a Tow; around one of which, made larger than the Rest, they drink a cheerful Glass of Cyder to their Master’s Heath, Success to the future Harvest and ect, then returning home, they feast on Cakes made of Carrawys, and etc, soaked in Cyder, which they claim as a Reward for their past Labours in sowing the grain. –This, he observes, seems to resemble a custom of the antient Danes, who in their Addresses to their rural Deities, emptied on every infocation a Cup in Honor of them.

Henry Bourne , John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Including the Whole of Mr. Bourne’s … (J. Johnson, 1777), 336, http://archive.org/details/observationsonp00bourgoog.

In addition to the wheat field, you could wassail the best oxen by throwing a cake on its horns. It’s really more about blessing the most important agricultural products, not just apples. And it is often wildly irreverent (How much cider do you have to have been drinking, and what kind of resultant mood prevailing to throw a cake on a ox’s horn?). One of the most commonly sung Wassail songs in the West Country is the Gloucestershire Wassail, and in each verse, something different is wassailed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloucestershire_Wassail

The Wassail of Oxen
A large cake is always provided, with a hole in the middle. After supper, the company all attend the bailiff (or head of the oxen) to the Wain-house, where the following particulars are observed : the master, at the head of his friends, fills the cup (generally of strong ale), and stands opposite the first or finest of the oxen (24 of which I have often seen tied up in their stalls together) ; he then pledges him in a curious toast ; the company then follow his example with all the other oxen, addressing each by their name. This being over, the large cake is produced, and is, with much ceremony, put on the horn of the first ox, through the hole in the cake ; he is then tickled to make him toss his head : if he throws the cake behind, it is the mistress’s perquisite ; if before (in what is termed the boosy), the bailiff claims this prize. This ended, the company all return to the house, the doors of which are: in- the mean time locked, and not opened till some joyous songs are ; sung. On entering, a scene of mirth and jollity commences, and reigns, thro’ the house till a late, or rather an early, hour, the next morning

Gomme, The Gentleman’s Magazine LibraryLibrary: Being a Classified Collection of the Chief Contents of The Gentleman’s Magazine from 1731 to 1868, Vol 3 16-17.

Thoughts For New Wassails

An important aspect of Wassail is to let loose on the last day of the official Christmas holidays, to get out of your stuffy parties and family gatherings and let the wild forces of nature rumble around a bit as you confront the uncertainty of the coming year, its crop, and your labor relations. Labor itself was important. The wassail recognizes that workers and employers depend on each other and offer each other recognition and appreciation. I think what made wassail significant in England was that it was an opportunity to ritually play out a lot of the scenarios that brought uncertainty to the year. Would the crop be good? Would the farm laborers and farm owners get along? Will neighbors be friendly? Will we make it through winter to spring? And from blossom to harvest?

The procession to the orchard or barn or field is particularly important. It’s a way of marking the significance of a place and reinforcing your relationship to it in a personal way, not just a functional way. It is a way of showing your love and gratitude to the place and the produce. When people sing to the trees, it always particularly poignant to me. To sing to something, is to say how much you love and admire it. How wonderful is it that we can express love to a tree?

But there is also a highly social element to wassail. I went to several wassails in Britain at local pubs. I went to some that processed around the village. The wassail should draw people together in a way that reflects their community ties. The interesting wassail adaptations I’ve seen through the years often take on unique aspects of local culture. Kate Garthwaite of Left Field Cider does a “bonspiel” which is curling tournament as part of her wassail in Canada. I love that Elizabeth Ryan of Hudson Valley Farmhouse Cider has turned it around to a blossom event that incorporates her Bulgarian music community. I did a Wassail at Finger Lakes Cider House a few years ago with Melissa Madden where her passion for draught horses played a significant part in the event.

If I were imagining a wassail for an orchard or cidery in North America, I’d make sure the wassail did a procession to the orchard or tree, with fire and singing, and music. But I encourage people to be realistic about the weather. It is just a lot less cold in old England and much easier to do the outdoor orchard procession than it can be in New England. Make sure there are indoor options. If I had some artist or theatre friends, I’d see if they wanted to make a little mini-play or interactive piece that speaks to your community. The mummer’s play in England, often a central part of wassail, is a very rigid stylized piece, but what makes it fun is how the actors riff on local politics or town dramas through the figurative action. I’d get a few musician friends to play. And I’d make libations and toasts galore! Beyond that, the wassail is your oyster (actually…oysters would be a very historical New York adaptation!)

Wassail! May your celebrations be joyful, your orchards productive, and your cider delicious.

“The Architecture of Orchards” in Malus

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I’m very excited to have my article, “The Architecture of Orchards” in Issue 14 of Malus, a mighty little publication spreading ideas within the cider industry. You can read my article here. It is available on my publications page as well.

I’m especially delighted to see my article in print right next to one by James Crowden. I discovered James Crowden’s book Cider the Forgotten Miracle while I was working at Goren Farm in Devon in 2004 as a volunteer through World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. I remember sitting in the barn near an ancient screw press and a barrel of cider while reading Crowden’s book. I was forever transformed. So I feel very honored to be included in a publication alongside him. Crowden opened my eyes to orchards as places of deep living, of stories, of tradition, and poetry.

Though I’ve thought about the material structure of orchards often, especially as regards the specific environmental benefits attributed to old standard orchard trees in Britain, I think there is much more to explore in thinking about them as architecture. The fields of vernacular architecture, landscape architecture, and cultural geography have tools for thinking about the intersection of natural and social worlds and how we construct the spaces we inhabit. I’m just at the beginning of this avenue of thought, and this article is an experiment. Tell me what you think!

If you haven’t read Malus, order yourself a copy or get a subscription right now! One of the wonderful things about this zine is its paper format, grounding us back in the world of material reading.

Dorothy Hartley: Verjuice

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41zXLaljcLL._SX338_BO1,204,203,200_I’ve been reading Lost World: England 1933-1936, a collection of essays by Dorothy Hartley, originally written for the Daily Sketch Newspaper.  Dorothy was an eccentric, a wanderer, and a writer, whose prose style was that of a novelist or perhaps a literary naturalist, but (thankfully) not the dry analysis of an anthropologist. Lucy Worsley, in her foreword to the book, described Dorothy as, “a slightly crazy but utterly admirable figure, who broke free of a solidly middle-class background to become a roving reporter for rural England. To research her books and articles, she travelled the country, interviewing country folk who still just about did things ‘the old way’ before mass production and industrialization and mechanization changed farming beyond recognition.”

I read Dorothy’s writing and meet the kind of writer and explorer I would like to be. But Dorothy slept rough under hedges and was not afraid to wander alone in the remoter corners of rural England. I’m not quite so intrepid. The scenes, people, and lifestyles she captured represented the last gasp of rural life before the industrialization of farming. Her observations highlight the receding quality of this world. Reading them, one begins to see the deep attachment to rural nostalgia underpinning English culture as the twentieth century marches forward. But in Dorothy’s writing, that nostalgia is not saccharine or rose-colored.  It is full of the raw material of old crafts and ways of life.

Dorothy’s writing is filled with the lexicon of another era.  In the passage I share below, she refers to “beetles” and “hogsheads” as she talks of the implements of cider making.  The recipe for verjuice that she provides calls for, “handfuls of damask rose leaves,” an ingredient I’ve never encountered before. Reading her prose, you experience cider not only as a constellation of tastes and smells, but a world of words, of knowledge, of the material experience of a way of life now past. The passage below is not one of her more poetic ones, but it is full of information. The source of her quoted recipe is unclear, but nevertheless, it is replete with detail:

….

From “Let us consider our drinks” in Lost World by Dorothy Hartley

Verjuice

Curiously, the Hereford cider and ‘Along-the-border’ cider are made after the old recipes for making verjuice.  Verjuice was the sharp crab-apple juice, used in medieval cookery as frequently as the lemon is to-day.  It probably had considerable effect in mitigating the massive meat diet and salted-pork-and-beans of those days. Here is the recipe for verjuice, because it is interesting in connection with the cider recipes:-

Gather your crabs as soon as the kernels turne blacke, and having laid them awhile in a heap to sweat together take and pick from the stalkes, then in long troughs with beetles for the purpose, crush and break them all to mash, then take a bagge of coarse hairecloth, as square as the press, and fill it with the crushed crabs, and press it while any moisture will drop forth. Turn it into sweet hogsheads and to every hogshead put half a dozen handfuls of damask rose leaves, and tun it up and spend it as you should have occasion.

Now in parts of the West the best cider makers look out for crabs, and crab trees figure among the hundred odd sorts of apple trees that various makers of cider import, and plant, and transplant, and acclimatize to improve their brews.  Hundreds of letters and MS [manuscripts] are about cider apple trees.

Down South they made the cider through straw and the variety of the brews show the antiquity of the procedure.  Cornish miners used to put hot sheep’s blood into it! Devon folks cream or milk! Kent writers mention the gum of cherry trees. Perry was never so popular, probably because the juicy eating pear, the Wardon, was prized for serving with cream and reverence, and the other pears were woody.  Some recipes make a stew of them in cider.

Cider belongs to the apple-blossom South as surely as whisky belongs to the heather-land North.

 

 

Pheasants and Pear Trees

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IMG_6362aThe end of January is the close of pheasant season in England. The Beater’s Shoot marks the day at the end of the season when the paying guns are done, and the beaters take guns in hand. At this point in the season, one takes aim at the wily fowl who have managed to survive not only foxes and dogs, but the other guns who’ve been at it since November. These are the birds who’ve managed to keep their feet on the ground, or who’ve won the lottery of the air.

I’ll tell you right now, that I’m a terrible shot, and my fumbling attempts with a firearm led me to the conclusion that I am left-eye dominant and right-handed – a physiology at cross purposes for the sport. But I preferred the work of the beater to the sport of the guns anyway. My eyes were better suited to sweeping the scenes of the hedgerows, searching out the silhouettes of trees. Old perry trees. The lone oaks settling in their centuries-old seats on the hills. The hawthorns and the blackthorns dividing the fields.

In England, one of my best friends was a gamekeeper for a small shoot on a local farm, and his sweetheart had an eye for good dogs and taste for good gin. Many of their circle were hunters and farmers and gamekeepers. Even my neighbour next door was gamekeeper. My social circle was the working edge of English Country Life, peppered with people in other professions: occupational therapists, farmers, conservationists, blacksmiths, repairmen, EMTs, and caterers. On the weekends, the working folks would gather for the working man’s portion of the country shoot: we were the beaters.

The beaters stalk the birds, flushing them slowly from their hiding places in the thickets and streams, along the hedgerows, chasing them carefully toward the edge of a hill, where they finally fly up and out, into the air where the gentlemen with guns are waiting to take aim.

On reflection it seems a bit unfair, chasing these dull birds to the edge of their small range of comfort, where they have fed and roosted all summer and fall, towards a trap of forced flight before a firing squad. But crawling through the hedges, and along the fields, the immediate feeling is a quiet rush, the thrill of stalking the quarry. The successful shot is more than the work of a trigger finger and an eye. It is the quick targeting, the end capture of a long slow ramble begun by the side of the road.  Jumping out of an old truck, sweeping the landscape of its feathers, with a long brushstroke traced by wellington boots on the muddy ground, the beaters flush the countryside towards the moment of the shot. And it is almost an afterthought in the air to hours of feet in the mud, wading through acres of wheat and feed corn.

By the end of the season, I knew the paths well. We traced a pattern each time, along a series of field boundaries, scrambling across streams, quiet, so as not to scare the birds to an early flight. You must keep them scuttling across the ground till the last moment. And each time I retraced the path I loved it more. My favourite hedge was one studded with old perry trees. Who knows how old they were? Or if anyone had ever collected their pears? Had they been planted? Had they sprung up as wildings in the hedge? Who could say? I loved encountering trees this way, as signposts on my path, familiar sentinels in the fields, yet lonely, somewhat desolate in the midst of a wild undergrowth of young hedge. We were shooing the pheasants, birds we could rarely see until they flew, through their daily habitat among the shrubs and trees toward a brief and panicked vault towards the sky.

At the end of the first drive, we would end up on the edge of the Dabinette orchard and walk to my friend’s family home for a lunch of pork sandwiches and cider, and set out again for the afternoon. And at the end, tired, we’d walk the last stretch to the pub.

The memory is three years old now. But what I think what a pleasure it would be walk out again with my friends, stand on the headland overlooking the Wye Valley, with Ross below us, May Hill in the distance, and my friends ready with flasks full of home-made sloe gin tucked in tweed pockets to keep us warm from the inside.

We would wave our hands in the air to shoo the birds towards the guns if they took fright and flew.  But from the top of that high hill, the escaping birds could see, like us, the Shire below, peaceful, settled into the grey quiet of winter.

I’m not so different from the pheasant. Who wouldn’t want to keep their heads under these quiet hedges? The trick is to keep your feet firmly planted on the ground.

Days later, after the beater’s shoot at the end of the season, I was in the air too, on a plane, flushed out of my beloved hedgerows by threats slowly pursuing me: the end of a work visa, faltering finances, the duty to return home to tend unfinished business.

It’s not the final shot that hurts – no – it’s the grief of letting your feet leave the textured, familiar ground of a beloved place.

Will the old pear trees still be there when I return, the oaks? They are long-lived trees, and I hope they will still be there to greet me, landing from another life, another textured ground in Ithaca, across the sea.

…

Pheasant Shoot

Written 2012,
For Toby, Kate, Howie, Ed,  Mel, Laura, Will, Mark, Ru, St.John, and the rest of the Rascals

Brrhhhrrrhh, the roll of the tongue, Brrrhhhrrhh,
A rough coo tumbling into the cover of wheat
Where the birds barely rustle.

The roll of a tongue and the rasp of a stick on the wheat,
The rhythmic beat, and the rough-shod treading of feet
over the wet pasture, over the stile.

Beyond, in the next field over, the unsettled bleat
of a flock of Shropshires retreating from the din of the guns,
to the far side of their pasture.

And the rolling hum of the beaters,
driving their wild feathered flock
towards one last flight for the guns,

From the hedge studded with old perry trees,
From the swollen stream and the bramble-curtained low ravine,
From the pig’s wood, from the maize, from the corn,

Till finally, their long tails trailing them, they fly
Over the guns, and the shots pulse out,
a patter of lead falls, a tuft of feather rips out from a breast

The wings spread out – the bird spirals down
to the crest of a hill,
Where a spaniel gallops, retrieves, the kill.

A whistle blows. The keeper calls the beaters in
To the pub, where they warm themselves
With ale or gin, counting the braces of birds they’ve tied and hung.

We rattle home in an old car that spills Van Morrison out the windows,
softening the curves the lanes.
The pheasants left to grey dim light begin to roost,
climb the darkening air to their nightly rest.

Cheese Meditation Minute

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11329750_10105723696852489_1755273131859855966_nI was drinking a cider and admiring a cheese.   And then I had some cheese thoughts that my friends seemed to enjoy.  Following this, I decided that the cider blog should definitely have a Cheese Meditation Minute every so often.  Because really, what is  cider without a good cheese?  The men of Compost Heap know this well.

As I was waiting for a train in Grand Central Station, I wandered into the Grand Central Market, where the Murray’s Cheese booth beckoned to me with its tempting artful piles of sculpted dairy.  My train ticket was to Beacon, a little town on the Hudson, and thus the name on a small round of cheese caught my eye: The Hudson Flower, a sheep’s milk cheese made by the Old Chatham Sheepherding Co.  Its rind was covered in hop flowers and rosemary, and I decided it would be coming home with me.  It seemed appropriate to pair a flower-covered cheese with my spring blossom pilgrimage.  Also, it was my birthday.  Some people have night cheese.  I have birthday cheese.

A train ride, a long drive, and a few days later, I finally unwrapped this beauty in the company of a bottle of Good Life Cazenovia Hard Cider and a pot of New York wildflower honey.  A perfect trifecta of New York made delicacies.

But the tastes of this cheese initiated a cascade of cheese memories.  Did you think cheese could have this effect on a person?  Now I am thinking of other herb encrusted, flower pressed cheeses that have crossed my path. One is the Hereford Hop, made by Charles Martell, who has preserved and reintroduced many heritage agriculture products of his Gloucestershire region on the west side of the Severn River, including heritage breeds of cattle, cheese, apples, and pears.  The Hereford Hop became one of my favorite cheeses when I lived in Herefordshire.  Hops were a traditional crop for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Herefordshire.  Toasted and pressed into the rind, they added a strangely robust nutty floral taste to the hearty cheddar-like cheese.  I purchased it for my farewell party when I left the UK – I think I wanted the memories of farewell to mingle with the taste of Hereford Hop, washed down with bottle-conditioned Dabinette from Mike’s cellar.  I still think about it in moments of gastronomic anglophile reverie.

The other cheese that rose to my mind was the Juliana by Capriole, a goat’s milk cheese made with rosemary and herbs in the rind.  This is very similar to the Hudson Flower itself, but the Capriole was a little more sharp, with a goaty kick.  The Capriole is made in Southern Indiana, and I used to buy it at the Bloomington Farmer’s Market as a special treat.  Once, I visited the farm and creamery down in the rolling countryside north of the Ohio River.  I was always proud to know the Hoosier state I called home could produce such a cheese. Three cheeses, covered in herbs and flowers, made near three beautiful rivers, in three places close to my heart.  Now that feels worthy of a satisfied sigh of creamery nostalgia for a breezy May day. This has been your Cheese Meditation Minute with Maria.  Good Evening, and Bon Fromage!

Mistletoe

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During my research in England, I wrote some fieldnote observations (reposted below) about my encounters with mistletoe, and I recently got to revisit them in a conversation with Annie Corrigan on WFIU Radio’s Earth Eats Program.  If you are interested in further information on mistletoe, please visit pages by Jonathan Briggs, whose work has brought the botany, conservation, and social history of mistletoe out of the orchard and into the 21rst century: Mistletoe Matters and Jonathan’s Mistletoe Diary.

IMG_2680December 8, 2011.  Fieldnotes. It is a windy, rainy day outside, and at 3:30pm, I definitely need the lights on inside.  I am perched on my little snug chair next to the woodstove. The darkness of winter here has definitely been one of the hardest things for me to deal with, and if left to natural devices, I would probably take a cue from the other mammals about and go into hibernation for the next few months.  The days are definitely shorter here than back at home, but I think part of it is the fact that my fieldwork takes me outside a lot.  Instead of being compelled to get to work in a lighted building for eight hours, I find the waxing and waning of the sun’s light has a much greater influence on my experience of the working day.

During this dark period, another product of the orchard has preoccupied me for the past several weeks, and that is mistletoe.  I only learned that mistletoe favored growing on apple trees, and particularly in the south-west midlands of Britain, in October, when my wwoof host at the Hatch pointed it out to me as we were harvesting apples and pears from the orchard.  He mentioned that he used to sell the mistletoe, but the comment escaped my notice until someone mentioned the Tenbury Wells Mistletoe Auction to me some time later.

The town of Tenbury Wells is located just on the borders of three counties – Herefordshire, Shropshire, and Worcestershire.  And allegedly, these mistletoe auctions have been going on for the past 150 years, though they were threatened with closure recently when the cattle market, where they were held, closed.  In an effort to help save the auctions and retain one of the town’s claims to fame, some folks cooked up the Mistletoe Festival, complete with a mistletoe queen, a Druid procession, and various other Christmas activities.  You can read more about it on their website here.

While the festival itself is, of course, interesting as a consciously invented tradition, I was actually more interested in the relationship of the mistletoe sales to the issues of orchard management.  It turns out that mistletoe thrives in old and traditionally managed orchards. I sent off some inquiring emails to the estate agents who run the auction, and received a reply from a local farmer who was happy to talk to me.

Armed with my photographic equipment, I set off to the first auction, which happened on Nov 29th.  Turns out I wasn’t the only one with a camera.  There were LOADS of camera-toting people there, from amateur on-lookers to highly professional rigs.  One guy, who turned out to be a floral photographer, even had his assistant/model, all dolled up in ‘authentic’ looking pristine wellies and beautifully matching fuzzy lavender hat and gloves, posing as if she was inspecting and buying the mistletoe.  The place was just dripping in nostalgia, or at least that is what all the photographers seemed to be framing in their cameras.

The actual business of the auction, though, seemed to go on without much notice of the photographers and onlookers.  And it was really business.  The auctioneer, with hs portable loudspeaker and cadre of assistants keeping track of the lot numbers, bidders, and prices, moved up and down the rows of wreaths, holly, and mistletoe, offering a starting price, sometimes with a comment to the quality (“look at the berries on that”) and taking the bids from the small crowd of what seemed to be seasoned veteran buyers. People in the middle of conducting business transactions aren’t terribly interested in being interviewed, so this situation required a lot more courage, so to speak, on my part, going up to people and asking if they would answer a few questions in between hauling their green purchases to their vans, lorries, and cars.

The guys pictured here had driven all the way from Cork, Ireland and slept in their van and were filling it to the brim for the trip home, where they would sell it through their Christmas tree yard.  They were very friendly. Many of the buyers were from florists and garden centers, along with some other small scale Christmas tree vendors.  My best tactic for talking to people seemed to be to stand near the bidding action, and turn to the person next to me to ask if they were selling or buying, and launch into an uninvited conversation.  The next week, when I returned for the next auction, I came armed with a printed survey in self-addressed, stamped, envelopes, which I could simply give to people to complete and mail back to me at their leisure.  Even so, it was hard to get it into a lot of hands.  I didn’t meet any sellers, but on my second visit, I walked up and down the rows of mistletoe and holly writing down the names and addresses of the sellers written on the tags of each lot.  Not all had addresses, but it might be a start for contacting sellers and talking to them later.

One group of people whom I have not had the courage to talk to yet are the gypsies.  Along with the farmers who bring mistletoe from their orchards to sell, there are groups of gypsies who gather it from farmers’ orchards and sell it on at the auction.  I did walk up to two men who seemed to be lingering by the side of the auction yard among groups of people whom I took to be gypsies.  As I tried to start a conversation with them, their first question was if I was a journalist, after which, one of them ranted for a bit about how it wasn’t all christmas cheer and roses harvesting the mistletoe.  It was hard work, at which point, he pulled up his sweater to show me an enormous scar running across his side and up to his ribcage.  I attempted to banter for a bit, and they seemed to warm up to me, but I decided not to push questions.  Maybe later.

I did go visit one farm, Eastham Court Farm near Tenbury Wells. I was greeted, to my surprise, by a 22-year old guy, recently graduated from an engineering degree, who had moved home to his parents’ farm.  And while he was sorting out what to do next, he had taken their mistletoe business in hand and set up an online direct-sales business, bypassing the auction.  You can find his website here.  He emphasized the need for farmers to change and adapt to new ways of doing business.  He took me out into their orchards: organic, 60-year old orchards which he seemed to think were in definite decline.  Even though they were lovely places to be, with their widely spaced, large, old trees, he didn’t think orchards like this would last much longer, as newer orchards with more closely-spaced, smaller trees were replanted. And there was the mistletoe, hanging in lacy green orbs from the branches of the trees, sometimes almost overwhelming them.  The farmers have to cut it back every year, or it will sap the energy of the tree and decrease the apple harvest, if not kill it slowly outright.  Piles of mistletoe lay on the ground, much of it to be discarded, as there was just too much even to sell.

Photos from Eastham Court Farm, near Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire, home of http://www.kissmemistletoe.co.uk

Elderflower Detour

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IMG_2498 June in Indiana is the time to gather Elderflowers, though almost no one does, except me.    Some folks here are familiar with the elderberry as an edible fruit for pies or cordials, but floral tastes are not something that seem to be part of the culinary canon here in the midwest.  I certainly had never heard of elderflower at all until my first trip to England in 2004, and then it was a revelation.

The task that still haunts my memory most vividly from Old Chapel Farm near Llanidloes, Wales, where I spent a month as a WWOOF volunteer and have returned to many times since, was gathering elderflowers and making wine.  Home wine-making, canning, or preserving were not part of my suburban childhood.  My mother valiantly tried to introduce us to gardening on our summer holidays, but it never stuck.  I came to love it much later, in my own time.  But she did always lovingly tend the flowers by the front door and kept houseplants thriving through the winter.  Green things always seemed natural companions in our home, more like silent green pets than objects of toil.

At Old Chapel, we trudged up and down the valley in search of elderflower bushes.  They always seemed to love ditches and stream beds best, and you would find yourself reaching  out precariously over some muddy bank to pick the large lacy flower heads.

IMG_2478Here in Indiana, I had no idea when elderflower would bloom in our much warmer climate, nor even if and where it might grow here.  I was lucky to get advice from a few of my local foraging friends.  It turns out the elderflower still blooms in June.  And it still loves ditches and roadsides and fence lines.  I found one bush just down an alley near my house.  A friend took me for a drive along the winding hilly roads north of Bloomington, where we spotted several enormous bushes.  The jury is still out on whether these will produce as fragrant a flavour as the elder in England.  I believe these bushes are a slightly different species.  The flower heads are enormous, and the fragrance dimmer.

The English love affair with Elderflower is something I wish I could translate here.  In the brewery room of the barn at Old Chapel, dozens of glass demi-johns filled with home-made wine lined the walls.  Plum, Elderflower, Apple, Rice Wine, Tea Wine.  The air was alive with the smell of yeast.  A honey extractor stood on the back table.  Empty jars overflowed from a bin, waiting to be filled with jams and preserves.  To me, this room was the most magical room I could imagine.  I would sneak inside just to look at the rows bottles refracting sunlight through the muted jewel tones of the fermenting liquids.

For the cider maker, as one of my friends described it, making elderflower wine is a good distraction in the early summer when next season’s cider making is still several months away.  This was certainly true for my friends in the Marches Cyder Circle, in North Herefordshire, who invited me to an Elderflower Champagne party, where everyone brought their fizzy versions of the brew.  Prizes went to both the best tasting drink and the bottle that shot the cork highest in the air.

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I don’t recall ever seeing a commercial elderflower wine.  Elderflower pressé, cordial, jam, etc, was of course available everywhere in Britain.  But the wine seemed to be something reserved for home-making.  I’ve often wondered why?  Is it too difficult to mass-produce?  Is it unpalatable for all but the staunch traditionalist?

In June 2012, while I was living in Shropshire and Herefordshire, I met Keith Pybus, a local walker, maker of jams and preserves, and an enthusiast of the elderflower’s culinary history.  He helped host an elderflower event with Grow, Cook, Share, a local gardening and cooking initiative.  Among the delights was an elderflower cheesecake or Sambocade, adapted from a medieval recipe.

IMG_2525To eat a flower always seems rather strange and indulgent – feasting on delicate aromas and textures that have not had the chance to fill out into the juicy, satisfying substantiality of fruit.  To eat a flower is almost to consume an idea of fruit, the logic of its imminent architecture in the flower’s shape, the soul of the plant hovering in its fragrance.  I always tend to see the world through hyper-poetic glasses, but isn’t eating a flower savage and elegant all at once?  And to drink a flower, to make it into wine: that borders on the magical.

Below is a photograph of the recipe I copied into my journal in June of 2004 at Old Chapel Farm, on which I based my recipe this year, 10 years later.  It’s a little off, but a good record of my personal history of elderflower and a fair starting point for a recipe.  5 lbs of sugar should really be 5 kilos (roughly 12 lbs).  This time, I used more flower heads to ensure the floral tIMG_2527aste, as well as a splosh of black tea for tannin.  And I used a commercial wine yeast suited to delicate floral flavors.  After fermenting in the brew bucket for about two weeks, I transferred it to the glass carboy with an airlock, and I can report that it is still bubbling slowly several weeks later.  Next year, in June, we’ll hopefully be drinking it!

 

Wassail: An Unexpected Revival

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Flyer for the Foxwhelp Morris Wassail, Preston on Wye 2012

I was sitting in a pub in East Hackney, London one January night a few years ago trying to convince a young man from Portsmouth that English people did in fact practice the custom of wassail.  “Wassail?” he said.  “I’ve never heard of that.  English people don’t do that.  I don’t believe you.”  I parried his aura of certainty with my own indisputable fact: I had just travelled down to a remote corner of Devonshire to participate in a wassail.  I had seen it for myself.  We had traipsed round a village in the Blackdown Hills singing for cider and wishing good health to the farmhouse, the garage, the old vicarage, the pub, and finally the orchard itself. English people DO wassail. The young man’s incredulity about the existence of this custom is understandable, though.  With a few notable exceptions of wassail celebrations that claim to have survived unbroken into the present, such as the one at Carhampton, Somerset, the custom seems to have died out or disappeared most everywhere else, surviving only as a festive Christmas drink or an obsolete word in a carol.  In the past few years, however, a notable revival has been rising, and as several of my friends in England put it, everyone seems to want to have a wassail now. So why did wassailing die out in England, and why is it being revived now?  These were some of the questions I set out to answer when I first trekked out to torchlit winter processions on the twelfth night of Christmas in Devon, and later Somerset, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, and Worcestershire. Many people think of Wassail as a remnant pagan custom, and it is easy to see why, when black-faced Morris men lead hordes of otherwise tame urbanites carrying torches through old orchards to sing to the apple trees and scare off witches with gunfire.  It’s an enthusiastic performance of what some might think of as a primitive, superstitious approach to life, which might seem refreshing after the daily grind of rational civility. Being outside after the endless indoor Christmas parties feels like a release, and the bonfires and torches light up the night in a way that wakes your tired soul from the dreary sleep of midwinter. And the cider, well the cider just makes you feel sublime, a bit euphoric.  The torches seem brighter.  The night seems blacker.  And it feels like anything is possible inside the circle of trees that almost seem alive.

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Morris Man from Silurian Morris at the Tenbury Wassail 2013

I think the custom’s visceral tactile appeal stems from the sensory stimulation of frost and fire and the imaginative tunnel of superstition usually silenced in a society based on scientific rationality.  It’s an opportunity to get out and be a little wild for a night, and that’s what rituals and festivals are often good for, shaking up our everyday habits and injecting the mundane world with mystery and significance we don’t usually feel. Some of the people I came to know who had helped revive wassail over the last twenty years had a much less superstitious orientation to the custom, though, and their perspectives shed light on some of the social realities of rural agricultural life and highlight the enormous social changes it has undergone in the past century.  Wassail, a custom historically based in rural society and food production, has something to teach us about the changing ways we work with each other, as well as the ways we interact with natural and agricultural resources. For Eric Freeman, a life-long farmer in the rural countryside of Gloucestershire, and his friends Pete Symonds, a former electrician from the Forest of Dean, and Albert Rixen, a plumber and engineer, wassail was a tribute to the work of the agricultural year and an emblem of the social contract between farmers and their agricultural workers. Pete Symonds is a skilled tradesman in a rural community whose livelihood suffered with the outsourcing of industrial work overseas.  He saw in wassail the opportunity to celebrate the social bonds of working men and commemorate the cooperative nature of agricultural labor in an era before industrialization. Albert Rixen, devoted to restoring old steam engines, including antique steam powered cider equipment, also lends his workman’s approach to wassail and cider making, keeping alive the mechanical heritage of agricultural work.  Eric Freeman, a tireless supporter of agriculturally-oriented social networks such as the Young Farmers and groups devoted to saving rare breeds of livestock, has dedicated much of his life to the practice of farming not just as a business or even a personal vocation, but a way of life still full of social and cultural richness.

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Eric Freeman holding the Wassail Cup at his annual Wassail in Huntley, Gloucestershire

For these men, the resurrection of the custom of wassail was not about superstition at all.  The considerable labor involved in preparing the bonfires and torches and orchestrating the festival mirrored the kind of labor they wanted to celebrate – shared labor, social labor, the kind of labor that was necessary to keep a pre-industrial farm going.  This is the kind of labor that makes work worthwhile, and which seems to be slipping away in a world of global markets, where labor is outsourced, rural communities are left slowly crumbling, and agriculture produces commodities instead of food. It’s also important to remember that the social contract didn’t always work, that standards of living for agricultural workers in the pre-industrial era were generally dire.  But wassail was a moment when the contract was tested, when the workers held the orchard and the farm hostage for a night, demanding food and drink from their employers in return for performing the wassail and ensuring a fertile crop in the year to come.  Superstition becomes bare social reality here, because without a satisfied workforce, the farm could not be productive.  Without workers, there would be no harvest, no fertility.  Wassail was a kind of symbolic labor negotiation, with the potential harvest hanging in the balance.  And the next Monday after twelfth night, known as Plough Monday, work started again.  The fields were ploughed for the coming year.

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Leominster Morris Wassail in Eardisley, Herefordshire 2013

It all seems a bit serious for a rowdy evening of cider drinking, morris dancing, and bonfire lighting.  And don’t get me wrong, sometimes one of the most obvious reasons to join in a wassail is simply for a good prank, a good drink, and an excuse to dress up in funny costumes and indulge in a little pyromania.  But the interplay of superstition, social history, and a walloping good time is what makes wassail a tradition with depth and complexity that can appeal to people on many levels, even as they face adapting to economic, social, and environmental change in their communities.

Can wassail take hold in North America?  A real, strong tradition here will depend on our own social needs and reasons for adopting a custom.  It will be exciting to see how it takes shape as we begin to re-invest attention in our agriculture, our orchards, and our cider.  In a way, the social contract we are now re-exploring with our food system, our environment, and our economies makes wassail all the more relevant, and the tables have turned.  Wassail, in all its irreverent topsy turvy midwinter glory, reminds us that agriculture and food production, even in our industrialized, exploitative, globalized era is still a social, and an environmental contract.  In an old-fashioned way, it poses the question “Are we in it together folks?”  And its pretty exciting to hear folks replying: “Here’s to thee old apple tree.”

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Orchard near Preston on Wye, Herefordshire, Foxwhelp Morris Wassail 2012

Wassail: Some Historical Reports and their Contexts

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5710196-MHave you been dying for some historical sources for the custom of wassail?  Come on, I know you have.  Lucky for you I am the folklorist with the super folklore library collection a mere 30 minute walk from my doorstep.  So I made my way over to the stacks at the Wells Library at Indiana University to forage for some old folklore collections that document Wassail (and then I found some handy online google books versions to share with you!)  Some of the questions a folklorist asks when researching a custom like wassail are:

  • Where was this custom previously documented?
  • Why did people want to document it in the first place?
  • What does this tell us about the meaning of the custom?

So, a little history here: the study of folklore emerged at a time when the rationalism of the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras (roughly the late 1500s-1800s) created a class of educated men who, infused with the new scientific method, began to wonder why many of their fellow countrymen still believed in or practiced ‘superstitious’ customs.  Early on, this study was called Popular Antiquities, and some of the scholars engaged in collecting and documenting these customs were Protestant clerics, clergymen who were particularly unsettled by the continuation of superstitious beliefs and practices of Roman Catholicism.  They concluded that many of these beliefs and practices weren’t grounded in biblical texts at all (and therefore, not properly Christian), but leftover pagan customs that had been adopted into the Catholic Church.  Sometimes their aim was to discover the origins of these pagan customs in order to root them out.  It is interesting today that many of our modern popular interpretations of folklore customs still hinge on an explanation of their pagan origins, even though the original impetus of Protestant reform has long since disappeared. (For some other ways to interpret wassail other than pagan fertility ritual, stay tuned for my next post)

What does this mean?  Knowing this goes a little way to understanding the perspective of those who documented wassail in the early days of folklore and popular antiquities study.  It answers some of questions 1 and 2 above.

So what does this tell us about wassail, and what it meant to those who documented it?  It means we should always be a little wary of taking their descriptions at face value.  Is wassail actually a relic of a pagan fertility custom?  Or is that what the observers in the Enlightenment wanted it to be, due to their own biases of class, religion, and education?  Further, could their informants – the regular folks telling them about the customs – be yanking their chains or manipulating the information given to these early scholars for any reason? It is impossible to know anything for certain, but by reading between the lines, we can make more nuanced interpretations about the place of this custom in history.  History is not a case of fact and fiction, but of documents and interpretations of the content and creation of those documents.

Here is one selection from John Aubrey’s early collection of popular customs Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme written between 1687 and 1689.

Writing slightly later, the antiquarian John Brand, one of the rationalist Protestant clerics, documented these wassail customs in his book Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of Our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies, and Superstitions, which was first written in 1777 enlarged and edited by Sir Henry Ellis in 1813.There’s lots more in the library, and you can wend your way around Google Books for many of the older texts.  For more information about the early Antiquarian folklorists in England, check out The British Folklorists: A History by Richard Dorson.