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Foodish Customs

Here are about 30 customs that involve food, including biscuits, buns, pancakes, eggs, cheese, bacon, oranges, apples, cakes, hare pies, rum, fish, flounders, gooseberries, haggis, oysters, nougat, long tail pigs, German sausages, and the world’s biggest pie. There are others elsewhere in this food section. Bon appétit!

Pax Cakes and Palm Sunday Cross, Sellack, Herefordshire, England, 1983

Hot Cross Buns on sale at Easter, Muswell Hill, London, 1982

The Shrove Tuesday Pancake Race through the main street of Olney, near Milton Keynes, 1986 (This is serious stuff - the girls complete the 415 yard course in a few seconds over a minute)

Before the start of the Shrove Tuesday Pancake Race in Olney, Milton Keynes, 1988 (The photo opportunities are at the beginning and end but the race is taken seriously by the fleeter of foot who cover the 425 yards in about a minute)

Tossing pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, Scarborough, North Yorkshire

Start of the Shrove Tuesday Pancake Race, Olney, Milton Keynes, England

A new ‘Widow’s Bun’ being added, by a serving sailor, to the collection of hot cross buns in The Widow’s Son pub in Bromley-by-Bow, East London, to await the return of the widow’s missing sailor son, on Good Friday 1986

Many years worth of ‘Widows Buns’ hanging in The Widow’s Son pub in Bromley-by-Bow, East London, Good Friday 1987

Specially coloured eggs for Easter Egg Rolling in hilly Avenham Park, Preston, Lancashire, 1981 (These stained and painted eggs were once standard but nowadays chocolate eggs and almost anything else that rolls will do)

Going Egg Rolling in Avenham Park, Preston, Lancashire, England in 1966

The choir and congregation of St Bride’s, the ‘Journalist’s Church’ by Fleet St, London, egg rolling in the unusually deserted street after an early morning communion on Easter Sunday, 1988

Going Egg Rolling in Avenham Park, Preston, Lancashire, on Easter Monday 1966

Easter Monday Egg Rolling, Avenham Park, Preston, Lancashire

A triumphant Cheese Rolling winner at the bottom of Cooper’s Hill, Gloucestershire, England, 1968

At the top of Cooper’s Hill before the start of the girls’ Cheese Rolling race, near Brockworth, Gloucestershire, Spring Bank Holiday 1968 (The lady on the left is about to roll the Double-Gloucester, while the Master of Ceremonies advises the girls)

‘Cheese Rolling’, illustration in ‘The Scouring of the White Horse’ by ‘the Author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays’, 1859 (This closely resembles the event which still takes place 35 miles away at Coopers Hill, Gloucestershire)

‘Bartlemas Buns’ distributed to children after their race on St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August) around St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Sandwich, Kent, England

Claimants in the dock, with ‘Counsel’ Claire Rayner, at the Dunmow Flitch Trial in Great Dunmow, Essex, 1984 (In the end the jury ‘found for the Bacon’ and they had to go home empty handed)

Harry and Betty Pepper, winners of ‘The Bacon’, with the ‘Judge’ and BBC Essex after the Dunmow Flitch Trial in Great Dunmow, Essex, 1988

The procession for the triumphant winners of the Dunmow Flitch in 1751 (from Chambers’ Book of Days, published 1862)

The Dunmow Flitch of Bacon Custom; Examination of the Claimants in the Town Hall, Great Dunmow, Essex, 1855

Part of the jury of ‘six maidens and six bachelors of Dunmow’ at the Dunmow Flitch Trial at Great Dunmow, Essex, 1988

Doling out the Bicentenniel Denby Dale Pie, West Yorkshire, 1988 (The first Denby Dale Pie was to celebrate the recovery of King George III from mental illness. There have been ten so far to celebrate momentous events)

The Mayor of Dunstable at the Orange Rolling at Pascombe Pit on Dunstable Downs, Bedfordshire, on Easter Monday 1968

Preparing for the Pancake Greaze at Westminster School, London, on Shrove Tuesday, 1973 (The pancake is tossed over the bar above)

Scrambling for bits of the pancake at the Pancake Greaze at Westminster School, London, on Shrove Tuesday, 1973 (One representative from each class takes part in the scramble for bits of the pancake)

Apple Bobbing at Hallowe’en, London, 1986

‘A Wedding Breakfast’ by Richard Doyle from ‘Manners and Customs of ye Englyshe in 1849’ (Doyle worked for Punch, which serialised these cartoons with the text a pastiche of Pepys’ Diary, before they were published as a book in 1849)

Wassailing the Apple Trees at the Butcher’s Arms, Carhampton, near Minehead, Somerset, 1967 (The performers engaged on this occasion were Adge Cutler and the Wurzels, famous in the West Country in those days)

Apple Howling with Roundhill Morris and children, West Grinstead, West Sussex, England (The name is the Sussex alternative to ‘Wassailing the Apple Trees’)

Cutting the Baddeley Cake at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, with the cast of ‘Gone With the Wind’ in 1972 (The actor Robert Baddeley bequeathed money to buy a cake for the cast in the green room after the show on Twelfth Night)

Hare Pie Scramble and Bottle Kicking on Easter Monday at Hallaton, Leicestershire, 1965 (This is the Hare Pie - rumoured to be beefsteak these days)

‘Christmas Feast’ (From ‘Christmas Entertainments’ by Field & Ther, 1740)

Helping mother stir the Christmas pudding, Hertfordshire, England (According to tradition the pudding should be made on the Sunday before Advent)

Sailors from a visiting Royal Navy ship pay ‘Constable’s Dues’ in the form of rum, Tower of London, late 1980s (A custom kept up for old times’ sake with large RN ships which turn up about once a year)

Sailors from a visiting Royal Navy ship pay ‘Constable’s Dues’ to the Constable of the Tower of London, late 1980s (A custom kept up for old times’ sake with large RN ships which turn up about once a year)

Wayfarer’s Dole available any day, on request, to passing travellers at the Hospital of St Cross, near Winchester, Hampshire (A fifth of a pint of beer and a small piece of bread - would keep you going for a few miles)

Blessing the Boats at Monteum’s Wharf, Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, England

The Collected Poems of Stephen Duck, read at the Duck Feast, Charlton, Wiltshire, England (The 18th century poet and cleric left money to pay for an annual feast, held on or near 1 June)

Black Pudding Throwing originated in the 19C in this (now demolished) pub, The Corner Pin, in Stubbins, Lancashire (It involves throwing black puddings and Yorkshire puddings, allegedly symbolic of the Wars of the Roses, and still goes on in the area)

Judging and Weighing entries for the Egton Bridge Old Gooseberry Show, the oldest of its type in England, established 1800, Egton Bridge, near Whitby, North Yorkshire

Judging and Weighing entries for the Egton Bridge Old Gooseberry Show, the oldest of its type in England, established 1800, Egton Bridge, near Whitby, North Yorkshire

Traditional Burns Supper of Haggis and ‘Neeps’ with whisky (Non-Scots might like to know that haggis is a savoury pudding mostly of offal and oatmeal, and ‘neeps’ are no more than swedes, a type of turnip)

At the Oyster Festival, held in early September at the beginning of the oyster season in Clarenbridge, near Galway, Co Galway, Ireland

World Flounder Tramping Competition at Palnackie, near Dalbeattie, Dumphries & Galloway, Scotland (The dread hand of the insurance companies put a stop to this event in 2008 though locals still tramp whenever they fancy flounder for tea)

‘Harvest Home’, celebrating the final load from the fields at the end of the year’s harvest (from Chambers Book of Days, 1862)

Harvest Home at Swallowfield, near Reading, Berkshire (from the Illustrated London News, 1863)

Harvest Home custom in France (Illustrated London News, 1854)

Apple Bobbing at Halloween

Halloween witch with her pumpkin lantern

Nougat stall at ‘The Mart’, King’s Lynn, Norfolk, England, 1984 (The first big travelling fair of the season, on St Valentine’s Day)

‘Delicate Pig and Pork’ for sale, from ‘Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair’ by Henry Morley, London, 1892 (Bartholomew Fair was a major London event every August for over 700 years between 1133 and 1855, on the site of the present Smithfield Market)

‘A long Tail Pig or a Short Tail Pig’, a seller of piecrust pigs with currant eyes, from ‘Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair’ by Henry Morley, London, 1892 (The Fair was a major London event in August for over 700 years between 1133 and 1855)

Christmas market in Lincoln

Food stall at Notting Hill Carnival, London, England, late 1980s

German sausages on a stall at the German Christmas Market outside the Town Hall in Manchester, 2008

Onion stall at the annual Cheese and Onion Fayre, Newton Abbot, Devon, England

Clock Tower assembly at the opening of the Cheese and Onion Fayre, Newton Abbot, Devon, England

Sheep, Widecombe Fair, Widecombe-In-The-Moor, Dartmoor, Devon, England. The fair is held on the second Tuesday in September and is said to date from 1850 but is likely to be much older. The song Widecombe Fair is well known.