One Fat Man

St Monica and the Official Start of the English Porridge Season

 

[St Monica, praying]

Yesterday was not only the feast of St Margaret the Barefooted. It was also the feast of St Monica... St Augustine's Mum. The fact that St Monica is St Augustine's Mum, and my tendency to interpret everything as a British panto, has often left me thinking of St Augustine in a principal boy sort of role, with St Monica as a jolly sort of a panto dame. This is obviously nonsense.

St Monica shares a few things with St Marge the B. They both suffered abuse in their marriages, and are both patronesses of those abused in marriage. St Monica spent most of her life worrying about St Augustine and, having converted from paganism, spent a great deal of time praying for him, and for others. Her husband, who remained a pagan, took umbrage (particularly to Augustine’s baptism) and treated her badly. Naturally she bore this with saintly patience.

It’s a good job that St Monica did convert, because she desperately needed the power of prayer – and all the help the graces of his baptism could provide - to likewise turn around her wastrel of a son, St Augustine, and to stem the great tide of laziness and debauchery that washed through his life. Of course we all know that her prayers were answered, and her son became one of the great Fathers of the Church, even if the Orthodox don’t rate him terribly much.

But why am I writing about St Monica? Porridge. That’s why. For many years my friend William and I have argued about when the ‘porridge season’ begins. William has usually opted for the first autumnal sort of day, and has even been known to have porridge in September. I’ve always considered it to begin with the first true frost. I’m sure my Scottish friends think it lasts all year, but we English, particularly Southern English, are more reserved in our porridge consumption.

Anyway, the great porridge question has long perplexed me. I was thinking about this yesterday as the rain was pouring down and I looked out on a bleak English August day. In fact I was thinking that I’d very much like a bowl of porridge, that it would be both warming and filling, but that I’d have to back-track on all my dearly held and conservative views about porridge in order to have one. Then, in the course of my hagiographical explorations, I read about St Monica’s habit of taking porridge as an offering to shrines. St Augustine mentions it in his Confessions, saying that his mother; ‘brought to certain oratories, erected in the memory of the saints, offerings of porridge, bread, and wine.’ (Confessions 6.2.2). St Monica eventually gave up her somewhat pagan habit of making these offerings, and instead offered a heart full of devotion. Presumably at this point she switched to eating the porridge.

This got me thinking.

Perhaps St Monica’s Day should be the official start to the English porridge season. Perhaps it’s there in the liturgical calendar for us. Perhaps one of the fruits of the new calendar (for pre 1970 St Monica’s Day is in May) is that we are now given a sign about when it’s sensible to start eating porridge.

Well it’s oatally good enough for me. Porridge season has started.

Torta di More for St Margaret the Barefooted: 27th August

St Margaret the Barefooted, whose feast it was yesterday, is (a) patron of difficult marriages, and of brides. She is one of those country saints from the middle-ages who lived a very pious life, reaching out to the poor and needy (barefooted) and ended up being treated very badly for it by a drunken irreligious husband who thought that her attentions would be better focused on him. Naturally she got through all of this through prayer. In short, she embodied the three Christian virtues of prayer, fasting and almsgiving.

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch of the imagination to see St Margaret wandering along the hedgerows barefooted and foraging for blackberries, which just happen to be perfectly in season now. Last night I had a small kitchen supper in my new flat, and needed a quick pudding, so with St M the B on my mind and feeling that summer was preparing to turn to a nice burnished autumn I decided to make this quick and simple pudding.

You will need:

Shortcrust pastry, enough to line a 9 inch flan tin – either made or bought (I bought mine as I was short on time. It was a mistake as it shrunk more than homemade).

Blackberries, foraged from aisle 2 at Waitrose – 8 oz.

Lemon, juice of one.

A big tub of mascarpone cheese.

A few spoonfuls of icing sugar

Vanilla extract

Single cream

A few sprigs of thyme (my own interpolation)

Grease the flan tin, and put the pastry in it. Bake blind in the usual way, but then return without baking beans to brown a little – this is the only cooking it will get. Leave the pastry shell to chill. Meanwhile mix the mascarpone with icing sugar vanilla extract and enough cream to slacken the mixture. When amalgamated add the lemon juice. Then it’s really a case of tasting to see whether you want it sweeter, or whether a little more lemon would be nice. I think the taste and consistency of a good lemon posset is about what you’re going for. Spread the cheese mixture over the pastry shell, and press the blackberries into it. Sprinkle thyme leaves and icing sugar over the top. What could be simpler than that?

Oompah Oompah, Bratwurst, and Beer for St Dominic, with the Turin Shroud: 8th August

The 8th August was the feast of St Dominic (it's the fourth in the old calendar). I spent it at the IOSOT conference for work.  IOSOT stands for International Organisation for the Study of the Old Testament. The society has a congress every three years, and this year it was in Munich. I was very excited about this, I'd never visited Bavaria before but felt sure it would be full of the Baroque Catholicism I love, and of good heavy food and beer. I was not disappointed.

I'd also been hoping that my visit to Bavaria could help lay a few demons at rest, with respect to the new pontificate. More on that story later.

There has been a heat wave in Munich. It's been VERY, VERY, hot. The conference did not have air-conditioning and by day four the inmates of the book exhibit were tired and unhappy. I'd been planning to sneak out for Mass at the Dominican church. But in all honesty I was just too tired and zombified to do so. I was moderately fed up about this.

At about 4 o'clock, when I was almost fully catatonic, a small man came into the book exhibit. He had a beard, a rucksack, and was barefoot (which I didn't notice at first). I was vaguely aware that he was going around the room talking to the publishers,  but beyond that my mind remained as utterly blank as it had been before. A few minutes later he arrived at my stand, and held a small card out for me to look at. I sat inert for a while longer before coming to. The man asked me what was on the card. I saw that it was a picture of the Turin Shroud. So I said , it's 'The Turin Shroud'. He said something to the effect of; 'yes, but it should really be called the "Christ" shroud, because it's Christ's shroud not Turin's, the latter being a place'. I nodded in agreement, I could not - and had no wish to - fault his logic. Then he said the card was his gift to me. I said thank-you very much.  He then offered me another card, with a truly ghastly picture of Jesus on it. I politely declined and said I liked the shroud better and to take two of his cards would be greedy. Then he said 'thank-you, you very nice. Goodbye', and pottered off around the room. By this point my brain had woken up and I took more notice of my recent conversation partner. I noticed his barefootedness, and beard, and simple and direct approach. I also noticed that most people were instantly refusing any conversation with him. This didn't seem to bother him much and in a few minutes he was gone.

I sat and reflected for a while. My chief reflection was that had I been in any way awake, or any less inert, I would not have been in any way receptive to this man. I would have turned him away instantly. I'd have presumed him to be crazy, and indeed he may be so. As it was I was given a small grace, for I also reflected that this man had asked nothing of me. He was not a beggar - at least he did not beg anything of me - and he did not push me to say, or react to, anything. It didn't occur to me to offer him anything in return, and this did not bother him. No, this man had quite simply brought me Christ, on my feast day when I had been unable to go to Mass, and because of my inertia I had found myself able to accept him. This made me well up a tiny bit - the heat was getting to me - so I said a few Aves for the man, and tucked the picture away. Here it is:

In the evening there was another feast day treat. The Archbishop of Munich, represented by an auxiliary, hosted a full-on Bavrarian beer garden evening for the whole conference. It was brilliant. I stuffed my face with pork steaks, bratwurst, sauerkraut, kartoffelsalat, tomatoes, pretzels, senf, obadzda, radishes, and sweet roasted almonds, and I drank a lot beer... which was brought round regularly. After a week of VERY tedious receptions where they'd served WATER on arrival followed by 40 minutes of speeches in German before the merest sip of a white wine spritzer I was worried the Archbishop would give us more of the same. But I'd had a large beer and two pretzels within seconds of arrival, and the bishop's speech was two minutes long and mostly said 'drink, eat, be merry'. It was great, and I could not stop smiling for most of the evening. It was partly all the delicious food and beer, partly the oompah music - for which I have a high tolerance - and partly that I knew this exhausting - but useful - conference was nearly over.

It was a great way to spend my feast day, and I enjoyed the excellent company of a colleague from another publishing house and a few sundry academics during it. Here is one of the many plates of food I ate:

Sadly I can't find anything to link St Dominic to Bavaria. But I did go to the Dominican church in Munich on Sunday for the High Mass (because it was in the international Catholic language of Latin and not the alienating local language which I wouldn't have understood), and they we celebrating Dominic on the Sunday as well, so that was nice for me.

If you too feel like getting in the Bavarian mood I recommend you make a German potato salad. It's like an English one, but with more cream, gherkins, maybe some egg. There are many recipes online, I'm sure you don't need one from me. I'm also not going to tell you how to grill a Bratwurst, but you should do that too.