A Festive Dish for Brigit

Pat Deegan

It is traditional for her celebration on 1st February for a dairy product to be served: butter or cream. The following receipe is an adaptation of what (I believe) is an English receipe: syllabub, but it uses foods that would have been available in the earliest Celtic societies. It is a little imprecise as I was adapting a syllabub receipe.

Ingredients For Two
Small Carton of Double Cream (this is a heavy cream which will hold it's shape when you beat it and the current small British carton holds 142ml)
Mead (70ml - about half the volume of the cream)
Chopped and Roasted Hazelnuts (small amount needed as for decoration only)

Preparation
First I put the chilled cream into a bowl and then poured out the mead into the cream carton to measure it. Unfortunately I was aiming for a carton that was about 2/3rd full of mead, as I had misread the receipe originally, but I think I must have filled it slightly less than that, and as I had bought extra-thick double cream, it still worked out. I added the mead to the bowl and then beat them together untill the cream thickened.. Then I poured it into a couple of serving bowls and scattered some nuts on the top, putting it in the fridge for a couple of hours before serving.

The consistency was more like yoghurt than mousse, as I had hoped, and this is probably due to it containing slightly more mead than there should have been. However, it is a very nice and subtle dish. An added plus is that it really does not additional sugar or honey as the mead is sufficiently sweet in its' own right - even for a person with as sweet a tooth as myself.

So tuck in and enjoy !


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