The Daily: 11 March 2024

The Hunger Moon went dark at 5am yesterday morning. Today the Sap Moon is a thin crescent on the western horizon. It is the middle of spring.

But for all this weather…

But maybe that is the point of spring. Maybe it’s our ideas that are unseasoned.

Humans celebrate the vernal equinox with stories of eggs and rabbits and flowers in profusion (that is, when it is not being celebrated as the sacrificial death of a grain god). None of these things are in evidence in my part of the world. Maybe not in much of the temperate sliver of this planet that has an actual season of spring. Though the vernal equinox is when day and night are of equal length, in the temperate regions, the equinox is surrounded by days of rapid change. Light and dark do not stay balanced for long. This is the season of imbalance, of change and volatility. It is coming out of winter, but there isn’t yet enough steady summer to breed new life. If eggs were laid in the Sap Moon, they would probably never hatch. So eggs aren’t laid until there is a better chance of survival — after the changes become imperceptible in a long chain of warm days.

Rabbits might be breeding now. Because they do that… but they aren’t hopping about in the spring grass. Because there isn’t spring grass yet. There isn’t much green life at all before the equinox. It is too cold, and there are too few hours of sunlight to turn into growing plant bodies. There are also few plant partners abroad in this weather. Insects are still dormant or distant. Same for most pollinating birds. There is always activity in the soil, but it is sluggish when the ground is frozen. Roots and their associated mycelia can’t access nutrients if all the pore spaces are filled with ice. Many microbes simply die in winter and they won’t begin to regenerate until the soil is reliably frost free.

Flowers are still weeks away — because all the reasons to make a flower are still weeks away.

The vernal equinox is not the beginning of spring — it is the middle of the two solstices and so the middle of spring — but spring is not quite the season of pink fluff that we imagine it to be. It is brown mud. It is white snow, quickly turning grey with dirt and melt. It is flow. Sap, meltwater, wind and weather. Day length. It all flows. First a trickle in February when the temperate northern regions yawn and stretch and shake off the lethargy of deep winter. Then the trickle builds to a torrent around the equinox… And then it reverses course and slows to the stasis of the summer solstice.

All the holidays are hard to hang permanently on the solar calendar. But the vernal equinox and Sap season — spring generally — all these are impossible. There is a fixed point, but there are so many fluctuating interacting variables around that point that there is no predicting spring. It refuses to be contained in our time keeping. We may see mild weather one day then a killing frost the next. And the interactions between all these changes create more unpredictability. If today’s storm moved just a few miles south when it was growing in the warm subtropics, then we might be having shirt-sleeves weather today.

But there still wouldn’t be eggs and bunnies and daffodils. Because all those beings need a bit of stability, and you can’t find that in spring. All that does happen before summer, in anticipation of abundance, but not on a fixed schedule, and mostly after the days have stretched out, giving plants the sunlight they need to feed us all.

Snow is not unusual spring weather. In fact, when it comes down to it, there isn’t much usual in spring. Spring is sort of chaos by definition. The sun is heating up the air, but the soil is still frozen. When the sun is gone, the air quickly chills off again. This continual temperature flux sends air pressure bobbing up and down like a corporate sycophant’s head, creating wind (also similar…). And cooling air sheds the moisture it sucked up when the sun was warming things, which makes for icy rain and snow. Plus the days are growing longer. More energy is being pushed into the atmosphere every day. So there is more capacity for extremely energetic weather — with sudden bursts of lovely blue skies and birdsong in between the storms. So “spring weather” is not one thing; it’s everything.

Spring is also not a fixed time period. Because all this chaos does not happen at a fixed pace. Yes, the length of days at a given latitude is uniform each year, but all the other factors that go into making the season are variable. And weather is the classic example of an emergent and chaotic system that is highly sensitive to initial states. Change a variable just a hair — a butterfly’s wing beat — and the resulting change in flow can be enormous — a blizzard in March. (Or a Blizzard…) So when and how this flow changes is not set in time. Spring does not begin on a given day. Nor does it end until day length stabilizes as the Earth moves closer to the solstice and all the changing variables settle down into a few weeks of calm predictibility. This settling can take days, weeks, or even months. Change is… well, changeable. All the different things that feed into spring’s changes have to run their specific courses each year, and very little is the same one year to the next. So the season of spring can’t be hung on the calendar.

I think of Spring not as weather or time, but as the process of awakening in the green world. In my experience, waking up is an unpredictable phenomenon. Sleep may end at the same time every day, but what happens in between full sleep and full wakefulness is substantially variable. Sometimes I am instantly up and able to think and tie my shoes at the same time; sometimes I lie there for quite a long time of fog, trying to determine if I am in fact awake or not. I imagine it’s the same for trees and perennial plants. Any number of small things might drag out the process or speed it up. But if the buds on the trees are any indication, then that process has at least started in my garden. The trees are awakening. My bulbs are too. Last week I found the first snowdrops. So, whatever the date or the weather, Spring has sprung.

Penny Loaf Day

March 11th is Penny Loaf Day, though it is also traditional to set the observance to the Sunday closest to 11 March. This is an obscure holiday that I’d like to revive. Because first of all, it involves bread (so, duh, of course!), and second it celebrates generosity that has endured for nearly four centuries.

In 1644 during the First English Civil War, Hercules Clay of Newark, Nottingham, had a dream that his house would burn down. This was not so unusual a dream. Fire happened frequently in England and there was also a war on; it was understandable that fire nerves might plague his dreams on occasion. But the very next night, he had the same dream again. This was a bit more troublesome, but again he brushed it off and went about his business. However, the next night he again dreamt that his house would be engulfed in flames — because things always happen in three’s. The final dream came on the 11th of March. Deciding that he’d best heed the omens, he and his family left the house to shelter in the country. Meanwhile, the next night fighting made its way to Newark, and his house was in fact burnt to the ground, the collateral damage of an errant bomb from besieging military forces.

Grateful to heaven for what he decided was a life-saving warning, he established a fund of £100 to pay his good fortune forward. Every year on 11 March, the fund distributed penny loaves of bread as well as clothing and shoes to those in need. This was not entirely free; the recipients were obliged to hear a sermon first. At its height in the early 1800s, the dole handed out nearly 3,000 penny loaves each year.

The charity fund has been depleted since then, but the sermon is still read in Newark on the Sunday closest to 11 March. There are, however, efforts to revive the old ceremony. In recent years a few penny loaves have been handed out on March 11th — but these days without the obligatory sermon.

A penny loaf was a smallish loaf or bun that cost one penny when there were 240 pence to a pound. Recipes I’ve seen for “Irish Penny Loaves” and the like tend to remind me of the ubiquitous hot cross buns of spring. And indeed, the nursery rhyme “Hot Cross Buns” tells us that they cost “one a penny, two a penny / hot cross buns”. Presumably the cheaper bun is the day-old stale bread price.

It’s not yet time for Hot Cross Buns, so today I’m going to do a slightly more expensive bread — soda bread. This workaday recipe varies from a basic salted barley loaf that serves well as hardtack all the way to a saffron and fruit confection that could be called cake if it weren’t so very satisfying.

I’ve chosen something from the middle of the soda bread spectrum — a currant and cardamom brown bread.

Irish Brown Bread with Currants & Cardamom

Ingredients

4 1/2 cups flour (any combination: today was 2 1/2 cups wheat, 2 cups bread flour)
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp ground cardamom
2 Tbs white wine vinegar
2 cups yogurt
3/4 cup dried currants

Instructions

To begin with, my normal recipe calls for an egg. I didn’t have an egg. So I scratched that.

Preheat the oven to 450°F.

Line a baking sheet with parchment and sprinkle it with coarse corn meal.

Most traditional recipes call for buttermilk. I don’t normally have buttermilk. But I do have an acidic dairy product in the fridge all the time — yogurt. It is sufficiently acidic to use on its own, but sometimes I like the extra rise of adding a bit of vinegar, as you might do for making buttermilk pancakes, sans buttermilk. I use 1 tablespoon good vinegar of some variety to complement the recipe per 1 cup of yogurt. You can also just use whole milk with vinegar, probably at the same ratio.

In any case, add the vinegar to the yogurt, stirring until combined. Let it sit for at least five minutes.

Using your hands, combine the flour(s), salt, baking soda and ground cardamom. Be sure to break up any soda lumps.

Make a well in the dry ingredients and add the yogurt.

Mix this with your hands until combined. Then add the currants.

Knead the dough until it is smooth and somewhat elastic. Depending on your flour mix (and your climate), you may need to add a bit of water. Whole wheat flour tends to soak up liquids, so I added about 3 tablespoons water to this dough.

Form the dough into a ball with a flattened bottom and place it in the prepared baking sheet.

Let the dough sit for a few minutes while you wash up the mess.

Using a sharp knife, cut a deep X into the top. (This is to let the mischief out of the dough, according to old wives… who probably know what they’re talking about.)

Place the baking sheet in a 450°F oven on the center rack. Bake for 15 minutes.

Turn the heat to down 400°F. I find it helpful to turn the loaf around at this point; cooks more evenly and helps to reduce the oven temperature quickly. Bake for an additional 30 minutes until it is golden brown and makes a hollow thump when rapped on the bottom of the loaf.

If the bread is not done at the end of 30 minutes, lightly cover the top with foil to prevent burning.

You can eat this bread as soon as it is cool enough to handle. It keeps for a few days in an airtight container. (Or beeswax wrap — which is my favorite thing for keeping breads fresh!)

It is best served warm with a bit of butter or creme fraiche. I also like fruit preserves on soda bread, but with the currants I think this recipe is sweet enough as it is.

And on sweet… In the US, most of the soda bread for sale is full of sugar and then often it is coated in a thick glaze, almost like it’s been candied. I suppose that’s fine now and then, but I don’t like sugar that much. And even if I did, I think the sugar would overwhelm the salty, nutty taste of Irish bread. So this is how I make it. For the record, whenever I find a recipe from Ireland (or really anywhere but here) there is never sugar added to the dough, though I have seen a few with a citrus glaze that probably makes it taste like Christmas. So feel free to experiment!