Mary Webb’s strange and haunting novel Precious Bane, which was first published in 1924, is an evocative account of rural life, its traditions and superstitions.
Set in 19th century Shropshire, the novel is narrated (and as the reader finds out later, written) by the central character, Prue Sarn, a young woman living with her widowed mother and her elder brother, Gideon.
Prue is afflicted with a ‘harelip’ – what we would nowadays call a ‘cleft lip’ or ‘cleft palate’ – a medical condition in which a baby is born with their upper lip having an opening from the edge of the mouth extending into the nose. In the 21st century a cleft palate can be operated on successfully within the first few years of a child’s life; however, in the 19th century these operations were rare and would not have been available to poor working-class families like the Sarns.
Whilst Prue refers to her cleft palate as her ‘precious bane’, something that causes her distress but is also dear to her, others’ responses are very different. In the superstitious rural setting, the cleft palate is not viewed as a medical anomaly, but rather a curse that has been visited on Prue. With the now outdated and offensive term ‘harelip’ deriving from the belief that a lip affected in this way looked like a hare, Prue’s mother blames it on a hare crossing her path during her pregnancy: ‘Could I help it if the hare crossed my path..?’ And the villagers gossip about Prue: saying she is a ‘very queer creature’, that she ‘took shape as a hare on dark moonless nights, and went loping across the hills’, and even that she is ‘a bit of a witch’.
Prue’s attribution as a witch is compounded by the fact that, unusually for a girl of her background and upbringing at this time, she is literate. As she comments: ‘It may seem a strange thing to you that a woman of my humble station should be able to write and spell, and put all these things into a book’. Prue’s literacy gives her power as even many ‘great ladies’ were limited in their ability to write, and would come to Prue ‘time and again, to write their love-letters for them’. However, it also makes her an object of suspicion, particularly as she was taught to read and write by Mister Beguildy, who is also shunned by the local community on account of his non-Christian practices: ‘He could read the stars, and tell the future, and he claimed to have laid spirits.’
In addition to the superstitions surrounding Prue, the world in which she lives is steeped in local folklore and myths, many of which concern food.
When Prue’s father dies at the beginning of the novel, his funeral takes place at night, as that was ‘still a custom’ at that time. Before the burial, the sexton (the person who looks after the church and churchyard) asks Prue’s mother whether there is a ’Sin Eater’ present.
Sin eating was a ritual practised in certain parts of the British Isles between the 17th and 19th centuries. The sin eater, usually a poor and marginalised member of the community, was believed to take on the sins of the person who had died by eating bread or a cake which was placed on or passed over the coffin, thereby allowing the deceased safe passage to the next life. As Prue explains:
‘Now it was still the custom at that time, in our part of the country, to give a fee to some poor man after a death, and then he would take bread and wine handed to him across the coffin, and eat and drink, saying – I give easement and rest now to thee, dear man, that ye walk not over the fields nor down the by-ways. And for thy peace I pawn my own soul.’
However, she notes that there were no longer any Sin Eaters in the locality, so they had to be sent for from the mountains, which occasioned a significant expense. So although Prue’s mother has prepared a ‘little pewter measure full of wine, and a crust of bread with it’ and placed them at the foot of the coffin, there is no designated Sin Eater. This is a cause of much shame and sorrow, ‘because Father had died in his wrath, with all his sins upon him, and besides, he had died in his boots, which is a very unket thing and bodes no good’. Whilst Gideon subsequently stands up and says he will be the Sin Eater, in return for Mother promising him the farm, the reader senses – and is right to sense – that there will be a price to pay for this sacrifice.
Local food customs continue after the burial, when everyone goes back to the Sarns’ house for the funeral feast, where they eat ‘funeral cakes… made of good sponge, with plenty of eggs, coffin-shaped and lapped up in black-edged paper’. My online research suggested that in the 19th century biscuits – rather than cakes – were more commonly served at Victorian funerals, with spices added to the biscuit dough for symbolic reasons (rosemary for remembrance; caraway seeds for the bitterness of loss). But funeral cakes were obviously a Shropshire tradition, with Missis Beguildy also baking a batch for the Sarns ‘in case we hadna enough’.
Cakes recur throughout the novel, notably in the custom of ‘caking’.
Prue’s brother, Gideon, and Jancis Beguildy, daughter of Prue’s teacher, Mr Beguildy, and his funeral cake making wife, are engaged. They have gone through a ‘handfasting’ ceremony, an ancient ritual in which a couple who wish to marry joined or bound together their hands to symbolise their commitment to one another. In the novel this is then followed by a ‘love-spinning’, when Jancis, Prue and other local women spend a day spinning flax and hemp into thread, which will subsequently be woven into cloth for household items for the married couple.
The love-spinning is then followed in the evening by a caking. As Prue describes it, ‘The name caking was given because we played cards for cakes. To tell the sober truth it was real gambling. The woman who gave the Do made a big batch of cakes, saffron or rich sponge, and sold them to the guests at a penny each. Cakes were what we played for, and the losers were bound to buy more, whereas a good player could go away with a big basketful, or she could sell them to the losers at twopence each.’
The cakes are won by playing cards, and a game called Costly Colours is mentioned with far from straightforward instructions:
‘Missis Sexton … stood by the fire, telling us about the game of Costly Colours – how you counted, and of the trumps, and how three of a suit was a prial, and four of a suit was Costly, and how you could mog or change, your cards, and of the deuces and Jacks, and ‘Two for his heels,’ and how if you made nought of your hand it was called a cock’s nest, and you were bound to give a cake all round’.
My sympathies lie entirely with the young woman Tivvy who responds: ‘I canna mind a word’.
Cake was the obvious thing to make for this post. However, a rich sponge cake did not appeal, and although I was initially interested in the saffron cake, I was less so when I discovered that a Shropshire saffron cake was a variant on the Simnel cake – traditionally eaten around Lent and Easter – being a fruit cake enclosed within a hard saffron-scented pastry crust (which allowed the cake to keep for longer).
However, earlier in Precious Bane reference is made to ‘mint cakes’, when Gideon advises Prue to make some ‘mint cakes and spiced ale for the fair’ as a way of earning some money.
I wasn’t familiar with mint cakes, but there are a couple of references to them online. My thanks to Kath from the Veg Patch Kitchen Cookery School in Shropshire who in her blog The Ordinary Cook has a post on Shropshire mint cakes and who also directs the reader to this recipe printed in an Australian newspaper in 1935.
Shropshire mint cakes are a version of Lancashire Eccles cakes – little round cakes made from flaky pastry and filled with currants – but with the addition of mint. Not being the biggest fan of currants, I used mixed dried fruit instead and added some chopped glace cherries, and some orange zest and juice. They may not strictly be Shropshire mint cakes, but I think they’re nice and the mint adds a pleasing freshness to the sweet filling.
PRUE’S MINT CAKES
Ingredients (makes 14-16)
Filling
150g mixed dried fruit
50g glace cherries
150g soft brown sugar
75g unsalted butter
1 ½ tablespoonfuls chopped fresh mint
1 orange, juice and finely grated zest
400g puff pastry (either pre-made or make your own; I use Ruby Tandoh’s recipe in Crust but there are plenty of recipes online).
1 egg, beaten, for glazing
Icing sugar for sprinkling.
Method:
Make the filling by melting the butter over a low heat. Remove from the heat and mix in the other filling ingredients.
Pre-heat the oven to 220C / 200C fan / Gas mark 7. Grease and line a baking tray.
Roll out the pastry on a floured surface. Cut it into rounds using a 6cm cutter.
Place a heaped teaspoon of the mixture onto the middle of half of the pastry circles, leaving a border around 1cm in width around the edge of each circle.
Brush the border with beaten egg and then place another pastry circle on top. Pinch the edges together to seal the cake. Brush the tops of the cakes with beaten egg and use a small knife to pierce a couple of holes in the top of each one to allow the steam to escape whilst they are cooking.
Bake for 15-20 minutes in the pre-heated oven until puffed up and golden brown. Place on a wire-rack to cool and dust with icing sugar before eating.
