Catherine Schuyler burning the wheat before General Burgoyne can feed it to the invading British army
Schuylerville, NY before the Battle of Saratoga
http://amzn.to/1YQziX0 A Master Passion, The story of Alexander & Elizabeth Hamilton ISBN: 1771456744
We’re about to celebrate the first of the old harvest festivals--Lamas, or The Loaf Mass. Living in an area that still has a great deal of agriculture,
I’m keenly aware of the seasons, though I’m also darn glad I don’t farm for a
living. Mother Nature isn't always kind to the farmers who feed the rest of us. This year She started spring with a
long stretch of uncharacteristic cold and rain, delaying planting.
Then just
about the time corn and other temperature sensitive crops begin to grow, She''ll sometimes send a “a flash drought.” Not this year, though! This was generally a good year, and though things were late, there was plenty of water. When those waving green vistas turned gold, the harvest began well.
Now, in wide swatches to the east of us, where the six mule teams still pull threshers and barefoot women hoe kitchen gardens and hang clothes on lines, the corn stands high and tasseling. If we can just get a few more inches of rain into the ground, this year should provide a spectacular harvest of maize too.
Now, in wide swatches to the east of us, where the six mule teams still pull threshers and barefoot women hoe kitchen gardens and hang clothes on lines, the corn stands high and tasseling. If we can just get a few more inches of rain into the ground, this year should provide a spectacular harvest of maize too.
When I lived in England long ago, I was thrilled to
enter my neighboring square stone Saxon church and see great loaves of bread, three and four feet high. Some had been baked in special lidded pans, but many others were carefully fashioned by hand. A stiff hard to hand-mix dough is necessary, with a nice egg wash at the end to make them shine. (It's more about keeping its shape and less about being good to eat.) Some of those loaves were shaped like sheaves of
wheat and others like men. They were leaned against the altar rail among the more usual floral offerings.
When I asked
who the men were, I was told that they were “John Barleycorn, the life of the
fields.” This was in a pub where I sat decorously drinking a Baby Cham besides my glamorous mother--so perhaps that particular informant was thinking of the hearty, earthy local ales that were being drunk all around us. (I'd hear the phrase again, some years later, back in the States, sitting in an art house in Cambridge, MA, while watching an extremely disturbing British movie called The Wicker Man.)
Another gentlemen, of a more scholarly bent, protested. He said that these loaves were a living link to the past, to the powerful Celtic sun and smith god, Lugh. Yet another man, this one in a green tweed jacket, disagreed. He claimed the loaves represented an even more ancient Celtic divinity, a god of vegetation, one who was born, died, and resurrected again every spring, on and on, for more than a thousand years all across the British countryside. That divinity's name--since the genocide of the Roman occupation--had been forgotten.
Another gentlemen, of a more scholarly bent, protested. He said that these loaves were a living link to the past, to the powerful Celtic sun and smith god, Lugh. Yet another man, this one in a green tweed jacket, disagreed. He claimed the loaves represented an even more ancient Celtic divinity, a god of vegetation, one who was born, died, and resurrected again every spring, on and on, for more than a thousand years all across the British countryside. That divinity's name--since the genocide of the Roman occupation--had been forgotten.
St. Just in Roseland, Cornwall
Years later, and now baking my own bread, an Uncle who owned many, many farms presented me with a bucket of wheat that had
come straight from his harvester. Cleaning out the residual dust and chaff and
then grinding it into flour took time, but the bread I made from this had an extra
dimension of taste, a nutty sweetness that apparently gets lost even from the
finest brands of commercial flour.
The impulse remains to say thank-you to the earth and the living gifts she bestows which sustain us. August always begins in my house with the baking of a few celebratory loaves, no matter how goll-durn hot it is outside.
~~Juliet Waldron
http://www.julietwaldron.com
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