Celtic Folklore Cooking [Paperback]

Joanne Asala (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1998

A treasury of delectable recipes, Celtic Folklore Cooking by Joanne Asala will help you select foods to serve at your celebrations of the Sabbats and Esbats: the festivals and ritual times for Witches and Wiccans. It is also a terrific introduction to Celtic culture. The recipes in this book were gathered during four trips the author took to Ireland and Britain, as well as visits to Scotland and Wales. She searched for people who still cooked in the traditional of their ancestors, passing down recipes from generation to generation. The result is a book that is rich in Celtic tradition. And the foods are delicious any time, too!

Like a well-stocked larder, Celtic Folklore Cooking offers plenty of tempting choices for daily meals or special celebrations. Pick from more than 200 tasty traditional dishes, all nestled among colorful food-related proverbs, poems, tales, customs, and other nuggets of folk wisdom. Each recipe lists ancient and modern holidays associated with the dish so you can select the perfect fare to complement the season. Recipes include:
- Mushroom and Scallop Pie
- Heather Wine
- Pratie Oaten
- Beestings Pancakes
- Hot Cross buns
- Figgy Pudding
- Boxty on the Griddle
- Barm Brack
- Sweet Scones
- Scotch Eggs
- Colcannon
- Cockle Soup
- Flower Pudding
- Flummery
- Mead

The ancient Celts celebrated their Sabbats with music, dance, games, food, and drink. Whether you are a solitary practitioner or a part of a larger group, food and drink should always be a part of your festivities, rituals, and ceremonies. This book can be the key to a wide variety of foods that will make you the talk of the town!

If you are involved in Celtic traditions, this book is a must. If you simply like unique recipes for foods that are as tasty today as they were hundreds, even thousands of years ago, you'll want this book, too.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Llewellyn Publications; 1st edition (1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1567180442
• ISBN-13: 978-1567180442
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 0.9 x 10 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #415,363 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #90 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Earth-Based Religions > Celtic
  • #92 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Regional & International > European > English, Scottish & Welsh

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Sabbats, festivals, and informal gatherings all have something in common--food. But choosing the right food for the occasion can be difficult. Celtic Folklore Cooking takes the guesswork out of planning a feast, with plenty of sumptuous ideas for an entire meal, from soup to dessert and even drinks to accompany your food. (Consider baked trout for Beltaine or Lammas cookies for Lughnasadh.) Joanne Asala gathers generations-old recipes from Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, Ireland, and England, associates them with appropriate festivals and times of the year, then sprinkles a dash of folklore between them. Perhaps you would like to learn the 400-year-old "Song of Harvest Home" while making Marigold Buns. Celtic Folklore Cooking is like having centuries of Celtic tradition in your kitchen, and it will help you find just the right flavor for your festivities. --Brian Patterson

From the Publisher

Many people today are following Celtic traditions as part of their spiritual paths. But the foods eaten by the ancient Celts have been little known--until now.

In Celtic Folklore Cooking author Joanne Asala reveals recipes she has gathered from journeying to the British Isles. She found the best traditional cooks in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall who center their menus today around the same simple foods that have fed the Celtic people for generations: fresh meats and fish, nutty grains, wild fruits, rich dairy cream and butter, and home-grown vegetables. More than 200 of their recipes are included in Celtic Folklore Cooking. But there's more!

Through the generations, the foods of the Celts have inspired a rich crop of proverbs, legends, and songs. Celtic Folklore Cooking combines the recipes with their folklore, resulting in a book that is valuable to Wiccans, chefs, and people interested in ancient traditions and folklore.

This book is as charming as a whitewashed cottage and cozy as tea and scones by the fire. Celtic Folklore Cooking will draw you into the culture, folkways, and character of the Celts, who have always lived close to the land and the changing of the seasons. This delightful book with fill your mind with joy and your stomach with tasty food. Get a copy today.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Llewellyn Publications; 1st edition (1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1567180442
• ISBN-13: 978-1567180442
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 0.9 x 10 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #415,363 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #90 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Earth-Based Religions > Celtic
  • #92 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Regional & International > European > English, Scottish & Welsh

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 47 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Tastey stick-to-your-ribs food and richhistory February 10, 2003

By "fluffy20109"

Format:Paperback

Absolutely wonderful. I love this book, and everything I have tried out of it has been a smashing success. If you are born again, or object to Pagan references I recommend you look elsewhere, the food is good, but there are pagan references and history of culture that you will not apreciate. For everyone else, understand, this book is full (and I do mean FULL) of recipes from our (Celtic) forfathers, and some from our contemporaries. Mincemeat Parcels with whipped cream, Michaelmas Goose with Sage and Onion Stuffing (delectable), Homemade Irish Cream, Eggnog (nummy), Poacher's Pie, Irish Stew (2 Variations), Venison Soup, Venison Roast, Saffron Cakes, Faerie Cakes, Herbed Honey and Herbed Butter, recipes for making Heather Wine and Dandilion Wine, Spiced Whiskey and non-alcoholic homemade eggnog, Scones and more!
Baked Onions, Cockle and Mussel Stew, Dublin Lawyer (Lobster), Baked Salmon, Roast Pheasant, Duck in Spiced Oranges, Whiskey Fried Steak, Welsh Bubble and Squeak and sooooo much more!!
And sandwiched in between it all, folk stories and history. I LOVE this book!! I can't help but highly recommend it. Enjoy!!

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Feast for the Spirit as Well as the Stomach April 16, 2000

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

I'll say right off the bat that this will be a book you'll either love or hate. There isn't another cookbook quite like it, so it's really hard to make comparisons. I personally think its terrific, and my coven has used it on a number of occasions. We've had good luck with the citrus curd, crescent moon rolls, soda bread, tea brack, and baked trout among others. Yum! Asala has taken on the gargantuan task of suggesting traditional Celtic dishes for the festivals of the wheel of the year: Beltane, Samhain, Yule, etc. Some of these dishes do stem from the earliest days of recorded history, others are obviously more recent in origin, so a purist may find it inappropriate to call this a "pagan" cookbook. Still, all religions, even reconstructionist neo-paganism, are fluid in nature and are constantly changing. What's important is the "now." You may still observe the "old" holidays by using "modern" Irish recipes. The recommendations are Asala's own, and I feel they have a lot of merit. She has also managed to distill a lot of other information into one convenient format. The proverbs and songs, especially, can be found in a dozen different collections. But I think she has presented them in a new way by placing them with recipes that they enhance. For example, if one of the recipes has "milk" as the main ingredient, she has linked it with a proverb about cows or milking or added a bit of folklore about cows. So I consider this book as a good jumping off point into celtic mythology and culinary history. If you want to learn just about the foods, find a book that is strictly a cookbook. If you want to learn more about folk sayings, check out an old proverb collection or poetry book like Carmina Gadelica.... But if you want to find new, creative ways to celebrate the gods and goddesses than this is the book for you. Even if you don't agree with everything she says, there is enough Celtic pagan and Christian folklore to entertain and inform any reader -- and I can say for myself the food is great! Read more ›

42 of 47 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars I agree it is a great book September 3, 2000

By Oavde

Format:Paperback

I agree with the other reviews, and there is not much I can add but I had to vote on it regardless.

I am allergic to yeast I was delighted to discover a book with bread recipes that do not contain yeast, I have since learnt that, in the past, nobody used yeast in bread, it is actually an inferior mass-production method to use yeast to make bread rise.

After buying the book, I was astounded to see so many wonderful references to Celtic heritage. It was wonderful.

The reason I did not give it 5 stars is because I believe some full colour photos of the meals would be nice ... although, at the same time, might detract from the wonderful country feel of the book.

I would say this is a very good present for anyone remotely interested in anything Celtic + cooking, it has a wonderful feel to it, warm, enchanting, entertaining you can actually browse through the little tidbits.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Evocative Culinary Connection for Celts and Christianity. Buy It January 30, 2006

By B. Marold HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

`Celtic Folklore Cooking' by culinary writer and folklorist, JoAnne Asala of Chicago is truly unique among the 500 some cookbooks I have reviewed over the last two and a half years. The only books that come close to it in combining spiritual and culinary worlds are the books on Jewish Holiday cooking. In some ways, Ms. Asala's book deals with things which are less alive today than the very active world of Judaism, since virtually no one except wannabe witches or druids make the lore in this book a part of their everyday life. But, that glib summary of our Celtic heritage today ignores two strong influences where Celtic lore still works on our psyches from behind centuries of misty influence.

The first and more subtle influence is the effect of Celtic lore on the placing of our Christian holidays. Practically every single Christian and Secular holiday, including Christmas, Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Carnavale / Marti Gras, Lent, and Advent can be traced to the mapping of Christian doctrine onto the pre-existing Celtic agricultural calendar. One can almost feel the palpable shadow of great Stonehenge, that early instrument for tracking that calendar, weighing on our imagination on Spring, Midsummer, Autumn, and Midwinter celebrations. While it is quite beyond the scope of this book and this review, one can wonder how the Celts in the damp north influenced the Greek and Roman based early Christianity, but it obviously did, in no small way.

The second great influence is more obvious today than it may have been for over a century.... This is the presence of Celtic iconography in some of our most important modern interpretations of ancient myths, recently enshrined in all their celluloid splendor in the `Lord of the Rings' trio of movies and in the `Chronicles of Narnia' which promises to begin another movie series franchise. These two works by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis respectively were written by scholars of ancient Celtic and Nordic languages and literature, who happened also to be great friends and influenced one another's writing. Other major repositories of the Celtic influence on literature are the fairy tales of the Grimms and Shakespeare.

While this overlay of folklore on culinary traditions may not interest some people, even people in search of the best Irish cookbook, it opens up the book to an audience which may not be all that interested in the average or even the better than average cookbook, because it does offer a connection between both the Christian and pre-Christian pagan calendar to the agricultural and festival year. This fills in for Christianity that major connection Judaism has between food and religious tradition.

While this book promises a `Celtic' cookbook, it intentionally leaves out part of the historic Celtic homeland which traditionally includes Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England (especially Cornwall), Brittany (in France) and Galacia (in Spain). It concentrates on the British Isles. It also recognizes that the basis of culinary tradition in these regions is also heavily influenced by Norse, Roman, and Saxon influences, let alone the introduction of New World vegetables such as the potato.

The first 24 pages of the book are a survey of the Celtic lunar year of agricultural milestones. This section is liberally sprinkled with tales of famous Celtic stories, but it's most dramatic effect is to show us how much of our Christmas, Halloween, Easter, and May Day festivals owe to Celtic traditions.

The first fully culinary chapter gives us recipes for drinks, heavily based on beer, honey, and cream. From this one would thing the Eire has a far greater claim to the `land of milk and honey' than does Israel. One of the more interesting little factoids in this chapter is the fact that the recipe for Irish coffee is quite modern, having been invented by an Irish chef in the 1940s.

The remaining chapters cover:

Breads, Porridges, and Breakfast Foods

Milk, Eggs, and Cheese

Soups and Stews

Vegetables

Fish, Shellfish, and Seaweed

Meat and Wild Game

Desserts

With the great tradition in the British Isles for breakfast dishes and dishes containing oatmeal, plus the development of quickbread scones and other breads, this book is a great resource for people needing new things to serve at breakfast. We get here the origin of the religious symbolism behind hot cross buns, a major tradition for Easter baking. It began not as a Christian symbol but as an offering to the Saxon Goddess Eostre (get the connection!) worshipped by the Greeks, Romans, Germans, Franks, and Anglo-Saxons (although the Greek / Roman image for this goddess may have been Ceres). For those with a literary bent, this and other chapters include great recipes for the celebration of Midsummer's Night, made most famous by Shakespeare's great play `A Midsummer's Night Dream'. For those whose interest is entirely culinary, I am happy to say that all measurements are American friendly, using our traditional cups and spoons. I also find the cooking directions to cover all the usual cautions about handling ingredients and testing for doneness.

The good culinary sense extends to the next chapter with its chicken stock recipe that is neither overly fussy nor overly long.

One of the best aspects of the Dessert chapter is that it includes many very good recipes using apples. Not only is Normandy famous for its apples, but it seems these little beauties are also a speciality of Eire, as every Irish cookbook I have seen recently features apples in many savory and sweet recipes. There are also several recipes that sound like they are straight out of the early chapters of `The Hobbit' and `Lord of the Rings'.

A pure foodie may be bored or annoyed by folklore material, but I encourage all people who love seasonally appropriate dishes to buy this book immediately and relish the great heritage gleaned from our Celtic traditions. Read more ›