The Authorized Version

 (Laetare Sunday 2023 St. John Henry Newman, Victoria, BC. The Rev Fr Lee Kenyon)

Mothering Sunday (Latare, Refreshment, Mid-Lent, or Rose Sunday) is approaching fast. As I stirred away at my traditional simnel cake to serve at our fellowship time after church my mind wandered to my favorite author and wondered how Jane Austen might have observed the day—or if she did.

Jane, as a good daughter of the manse, would certainly have been aware of Lent and probably observed it to some extent. Although there were fewer special church services in Lent after the Reformation, sources such as Samuel Pepys diary assure us that Lenten fasting was observed. The 18th century was a notoriously slack time for church observance. Few clergymen tended their flock as faithfully as Jane’s father, the Reverend George Austen, and Jane made great sport in her novels of the foibles she observed in the many clergymen she would have known. Jane herself was devout in her Christian observance and duty and celebrated faithfulness in giving us her hero Edmund as a model cleric in her novel Mansfield Park. Although the church observance of Lent was less, the societal observance was greater than in our own day. The pleasure gardens, ballrooms, theatres, and the Opera tended to close for Lent. Covent Garden presented Oratorios during Lent.

Although Jane Austen would not have referred to the day by its formal name of Latare, the fourth Sunday in Lent has been observed as Mothering Sunday since Medieval times. The practice of holding a special service on that Sunday for individuals to return to their mother church (usually the church where an individual was baptized) began in the 1700s. This activity was soon coined as going ‘a-mothering’.

Which brings us back to my Simnel Cake for which I move on to rolling out a pound of marzipan to form the middle layer. This special cake’s lengthy history also goes back to Medieval times. The name is believed to have come from the Latin simila, meaning fine flour, from which the coarser ground flour semolina also derives its name. At least as early as the 17th century the cake became associated with Mothering Sunday because on that day servants, apprentices, and children in boarding schools were given the day off to return to their “mother” or home church. At the same time, they would go home to their mothers and take them a gift—the most usual being a Simnel Cake—and ask for their mother’s blessing.

The 17th century poet Robert Herrick wrote:

The original version of this light fruit cake was both baked and boiled. In the mid-18th century a humerous poem gave a mythical explanation of this beginning with husband Simon and wife Nellie arguing over the procedure. 

(Orders in Orbit by S. J. Forrest)

I did, indeed, find period recipes instructing that the fruit cake be boiled, but none that chose Sim and Nell's half and half method. I chose straightforward baking for mine.

Because of the strict fasting many observed at this season, relaxing dietary restrictions with a rich, marzipan-filled cake would, indeed, be a special refreshment. It should be noted that eating this on a Sunday was not a breaking of Lenten fasting, because Sundays are not counted as part of the 40 days of Lent.

Although I could find no references to Jane or any in the Austen family observing Mothering Sunday, nor did I find a Simnel Cake recipe included in Martha Lloyd’s Household Book, The Original Manuscript from Jane Austen’s Kitchen, edited by Julienne Gehrer, recipes for fruit cakes abound from the 18th century. “The Cake that will keep Half a Year” from Georgian Recipes and Remedies, a Country Lady’s Household Handbook, by Michael J. Rochford, is an excellent example. It includes 5 pounds of fine flour, 6 pounds of currants, half a dozen eggs plus 16 yolks, 2 and 1/2 pints of butter, as well as sugar, candied peel, spices, orange flower water, best ale yeast, and 1 and 1/2 pints of cream. My ingredients were modest in comparison.

Then to the almond paste, which features so wonderfully in Simnel Cake with it’s middle layer baked inside, then another pound rolled out on top, plus 11 marzipan balls representing the 11 faithful disciples to finish it all. Reading 18th and 19th century recipes that included this popular ingredient, I quailed at the process which included blanching the almonds, pounding them with mortar and pestle, then stirring until dry over a low fire. All I had to do was peel off the silver foil keeping my store-bought rolls fresh.

And I found Nigella Lawson’s recipe far more manageable than any of the period receipts I consulted. Which left me with more time to enjoy reading Jane Austen and to think about the variety of mothers she gave to the world in her novels: comic, caring; absent, opportunistic; grasping, giving…

Then there was Jane’s relationship and patience with her own mother who seems to have been difficult to live with at times, comic at times, and insensitive at the least to allow her terminally ill daughter to rest on two chairs pushed together in order to leave the sofa for her mother. Perhaps in a way every day was Mother’s Day for Jane Austen.