SIMNEL CAKES.

Bruce Herald, Volume XXI, Issue 2180, 4 July 1890, Page 5

SIMNEL CAKES.

The precise significance of the old world fashion of giving simnel cakes at this season of the year (Lent) has lately excited some discussion in the columns devoted to notes and queries in the provincial press. A good many people — in fact, most people — do not now-a-dayg know what simnel cakes are, nor how they are made. A correspondent of the Table, who has acquired some special knowledge of the subject, says : 'Die simnel cake has some bearing on Mid-Lent or Mothering Sunday. In "mothering " we have a term which owes its origin to the ancient practise of sons and daughters who had entered into the cares and trials of manbood and womanhood going to visit their parents, and especially the maternal one, taking with them some little present^such as a cake or trinket. A youth engaged in this amiable act of duty was said to be going a-mothering, and hence the day came to be known as Mothering Sunday. There waa, as may be expected, much good cheer to honour the day, the prominent dish furmetss-a wheat grain boiled in milk with sugar and spices. has a couplet — I'll to thee a simnel brinp, 'Gainst thou go a-mothering ; obvious-y alluding to the sweet cake brought by the young folks to the mother. The usage of these cakes or simnels is evidently of great antiquity. The name is found in early English and also in very old French, and it appears in mediaeval Latin in the form of gimanettus or siminelius ; and it is considered to be derived from simila, fine flour. It is evidently used by medieeval writers in the sense of a cake, which was then called artqcopus — a word cod stan tly explained by simnel in

the Latin-English vocabularies. There are some curious stories relative to the meaning of the name. Some say that the father of Lambert Simnel, the pretender in the reign of Henry VI T., was a baker and the first maker of simnels. A recipe for the making of simnel cakes runs as follows : — Beat ltt>. of butter to a cream, add whites of six eggs well beaten, lOoz. powdered sugar, l£lb. currants, lib flour, 4oz. candied nitron, 3oz. candied lemon, soz. almonds (blanched and pounded), grated nutmeg, spices, and salt. Beat all these ingredients into the bowl separately. Make a paste of flour and water, roll it out, fill it with the mixture, tie all up in a pudding-cloth, and boil for three hours. When boiled, remove the cloth, brush the paste over with egg, and bake in a slow oven until the crust is hard.