Mother's Day Recipes 

Carlings

Carlings, also known as carlines or carles, are cakes made from pease (steeped grey peas) fried in butter and then seasoned with salt and butter. These pancakes were a favourite for Shrove Tuesday, and throughout the Lenten season. Some of today's recipes are fancied up by adding liquor or sweeteners, or other ingredients. This is definitely a modern innovation: even the butter used to fry carlings was considered a luxury at a time when Lent was a very serious matter.

Furmety

Fermety is known by quite a few names: furmetory; frumenty; furmity. It's a sort of custard made with grains (usually barley) in milk and eggs. Once cooked, it can be flavoured with sugar. It is traditional for mothers to serve furmety to their children as part of a Mothering Sunday meal. The children, in their turn, supply the mothering cake and bouquets of hand picked flowers.

Simnel

Simnel is a rich fruitcake. Often it is topped with marzipan, and sometimes there will be a marzipan layer inside the cake too. This cake used to be given as a mothering cake, but it seems that today it is more popular during the Easter season. The cake was made rich because it had to keep until Easter: Mothering Sunday was in the middle of the Lenten fast, and cake was on the list of forbidden foods!

Recipes

The recipes you'll find on these web sites range from traditional to modern. You'll also find a few sites that are run by bakeries, who will actually ship you an authentic simnel pretty much anywhere in the world!

If you need conversions for oven temperatures, we refer you to the rec.food.cooking conversion table (they also have information on ingredient substitutions, as well as conversions for weights and measures.)

Also, please be careful with recipes that call for raw egg in the topping! While it used to be fairly safe to consume raw egg and to use it to crystallize flowers and such, today there is sufficient concern about salmonella to avoid using eggs unless they are well cooked. Please, when a recipe calls for raw egg, please use a substitute.

Carlings

Carlings are fried cakes made from pease. They were traditionally served on Carling, or Passion, Sunday in Northumbria.

Fancy Carling Recipe

This is a slightly fancier recipe, with rum and sugar that surely wouldn't have been permitted during Lent!

The First Thanksgiving

This is a Thanksgiving site, and the furmety recipe given here is said to be an "Indian Pudding," but furmety is indeed a traditional food for Mothering Sunday. You'll find the recipe at the very bottom of the page, so just keep scrolling down.

Simnel Cake

A rich fruitcake traditionally given as a mothering cake on the fourth Sunday of Lent. The description on this site says it is an Easter cake, and indeed it would be eaten around Easter, for it was too rich to be eaten during the Lenten fast.

Simnel Recipe

This recipe has two marzipan layers and a jam glaze. Be careful of using raw egg, though, since there is a concern about salmonella these days. (See information on below.)

Vegetarian Simnel

This vegetarian recipe is a rich version of the simnel, with a marzipan-apricot topping.

Yet Another Simnel

This version is decorated with crystallised flowers. Again, be careful of the raw egg.

Dried Fruit Recipes

Almond bread, creamy rabbit and spinach pie, hotcross sultana muffins and a traditional simnel.

Recipes for Mother

A bunch of strawberry desserts, a little out of season on Mother's Day here in Montreal, and a simnel cake.

Traditional Recipes for Shrovetide & Lent

Recipes for pancakes, simnel cake and hot cross buns. You may need some conversions for these recipes if you live in North America or Continental Europe: they're written with Imperial measures including gas mark temperatures.

Resources

Buy a Simnel Online

... Or just look at the picture! This site belongs to Fitzbillies, a Cambridge bakery that makes simnel cakes for Mother's Day and Easter.

Article on Egg and Egg Product Safety

Some of the information in this article refers to food laws in the US, so it won't apply to those of you who live elsewhere, but the rest explains clearly why there is a concern about eating raw eggs. It lists a number of foods, from homemade mayonnaise and ice cream, to chiffon pies and fruit whips, that do (or might) contain raw egg, and should therefore be avoided. There's also a guide to handling eggs safely: learn why not to wash your eggs, and how long they have to be cooked to rule out the possibility of salmonella poisoning. Finally, there are ideas on how to make things like eggnog and homemade ice cream safely. A concise, but very complete, resource!

Functions of Baking Ingredients

This article groups ingredients under categories like "flour," "leavening agents" and "fats." Under each heading different ingredients are explored, for example leavening agents described are baking soda, baking powder, and yeast. This is a good document to consult if you want to replace an ingredient in a recipe and you're not sure if you can, or what a good substitute might be.