December 17th – A cautionary carol of feisty feasting

For our next contender in the oddball category, we return, again, to the marvellous world of Sloane ms 2593, and its store of alternative carols.

In this instance, that store should perhaps be a grain-store, for today’s tongue-in-cheek verse is all about breaking bread. The disenchanted older male narrator takes the opportunity to bestow the wisdom of his experience of marriage onto any younger men listening, bemoaning that his good wife will provide for him neither meat, bread nor cheese after a hard day’s work ploughing.

Exploring hospitality, differences of perspective, and inter-generational advice, perhaps this is the carol for anyone with a full house at Christmas?

“зyng men I warne зou euerychon

Elde wywys tak зe non

for I myself haue on at hom

I dar not seyn quan che seyзt pes (1)

Quan icum fro þe plow at non

In a reuen dych myn mete is don

I dar not askyn our dame a spon (2)

If I aske our dame bred

che takyt a staf & brekit myn hed

& doþ me rennyn vnder þe led (3)

If I aske our dame fleych

che brekit myn hed with a dych

boy þou art not worзt a reych I dar &c’ (4)

If I aske our dame chese

boy che seyзt al at ese

þou art not worзt half a pese

I dar not sey quan che seyзt pes·” (5)

(Carol found in Wright, “Carols from a manuscript”, pp. 70 – 71; transcription by Dr Kathleen Rose Palti, “‘Synge we now alle and sum’: Three Fifteenth-Century Collections of Communal Song A study of British Library, Sloane MS 2593; Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. e.1; and St John’s College, Cambridge, MS S.54” (Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D., University College London Volume II: Appendices)

To marry with this left-field carol, here is a similarly unusual recipe for “cheese”, recorded by Mrs Janet Greig. Mrs Greig lived as tenant at Myres Castle, Auchtermuchty (Fife), beginning in the 1820s to her death in 1862, renting from the Bruce family. Many of the recipes in her collection suggest an international flair, and this is no different:

“Cheese it is said of extremely fine quality is manufactured from potatoes in Thuringia and part of Saxony in the following manner – after having collected a quantity of potatoes of good quality giving preference to the large white kind they are boiled in a caldron and turning cool they are picked and reduced to pulp”

To this is then added sour milk and salt, the mix kneaded and then left to mature in small baskets for 15 days. Sadly, the book does not note whether Mrs Greig ever attempted this recipe, and how it was received.

But turning to page 25, where Janet Greig has recorded “Mrs McFarlane’s recipe for making bread”, we begin to see a common thread in her culinary interests – potatoes; certainly, an ingredient which grows well in the Fife climate.

The recipe opens with the instruction to “boil and mash 6 potatoes, cut them with a spoon through a hair [sieve] with rather more than a scotch pint of lukewarm milk or water”. Anyone with left over tatties after their festive feasting take note – this is just the ticket for anyone who has over-catered on the spud front over the holidays.

For more on the owners of Myres Castle, see: Margaret Tyndall Bruce (c.1780-1869) of Falkland and India, by Sarah Leith – St Andrews and the Legacies of Empire