Mothering Sunday in the UK falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent which this year will be on 10 March. We have celebrated Mothering Sunday which was also known as Refreshment Sunday, Pudding Pie Sunday or Mid-Lent Sunday since at least the 16th century.
It was a day in Lent when the fasting rules were relaxed in honour of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. No one is absolutely certain how the name Mothering Sunday came about but one theory is that the celebration could have been adopted from a Roman Spring festival celebrating Cybele, their Mother Goddess.
Most Sundays in the year churchgoers in England worship at their nearest parish or 'daughter church'. Centuries ago it was considered important for people to return to their home or 'mother' church once a year. So each year in the middle of Lent, everyone would visit their mother church - the main church or cathedral of the area.
Inevitably the return to the mother church became an occasion for family reunions when children who were working away returned home. It was quite common in those days for children to leave home for work once they were ten years old.
Most historians think that it was the return to the mother church which led to the tradition of children, particularly those working as domestic servants, or as apprentices, being given the day off to visit their mother and family.
As they walked along the country lanes, children would pick wild flowers or violets to take to church or give to their mother as a small gift. They might also take a gift of a cake, traditionally a Simnel Cake.
Eventually, this religious tradition evolved into the Mother’s Day tradition of giving gifts to mothers.
A Simnel cake is a fruit cake with two layers of almond paste, one on top and one in the middle. Different towns had their own recipes and shapes of the Simnel cake. Bury, Devizes and Shrewsbury produced large numbers to their own recipes, but it is the Shrewsbury version that became most popular and well known.
The name Simnel probably comes from the Latin word simila which means a fine wheat flour usually used for baking a cake. A popular legend attributes the invention of the Simnel cake to Lambert Simnel but this is clearly false since the Simnel cake appears in English literature much earlier than Lambert.
There's also a Shropshire legend that a man called Simon and his wife Nell argued over whether the cake for Mothering Sunday should be baked or boiled. In the end they did both, so the cake was named after both of them: SIM-NELL!
The cake is made with 11 balls of marzipan icing on top representing the 11 disciples. (Judas is not included.) Traditionally, sugar violets would also be added.
No comments:
Post a Comment