Our Burns Night supper

A traditional Burns Night supper is usually held to commemorate the eighteenth century poet Robert Burns' birthday. It might include drinking Scotch whisky, eating haggis and 'neeps and tatties', reading poems by Burns, Scotland's most famous poet, and singing Auld Lang Syne. We celebrated our Scottish heritage tonight with a kid-friendly version. We made a few changes - I hope not too irreverent - and I must say, we had a fine time of it. 

Instead of whisky we each drank a 'wee dram' of apple juice, and we substituted a meaty haggis with a veggie version (pictured below). This is made from a mixture of oatmeal, spices, beans, lentils and vegetables stuffed into a heatproof casing, and not a sheep's stomach - as is traditional.

After baking it for an hour in a shallow dish of water, I arranged it so it looked like a kind of rare Scottish beast as pictured below. Now I know it's this kind of thing that propagates the well-known misconception that a haggis is actually a wild animal, but I just couldn't resist. And just in case no one liked the haggis I cooked a few sausages on the side. No one liked the haggis.

Instead of 'neeps  and tatties' (turnips and potatoes) we mashed potato and carrots with plenty of butter. I'm pleased to say these were much more popular than the grizzly veggie monster.

During dinner, instead of Burns' poetry, we enjoyed a fabulous Scottish story about a boy and his bagpipes called You can't play Here by Angus Corby. And at the end of our meal, in place of the traditional Burns' song Auld Lang Syne, we listened to the music of Scottish band - The Proclaimers. My six-year-old son wrapped the McKenzie tartan table runner around his waist like a kilt, and both children danced their little hearts out to the track I'm gonna be (500 miles).

I knew I wouldn't be able to cope with any rendition of Burns' Ae Fond Kiss tonight - it's just too sad - so we finished our Scottish evening by listening to The Proclaimers' waltz Sunshine on Leith. This, however, turned out to be just as moving as the song I'd been avoiding; I ended up in tears at the 'beauty and kindness' of my dear children as they sang and danced along with this wonderful and poignant song. 

So here to mark Burns Night, and all things Scottish, are not the words of Robert Burns but those of The Proclaimers; I like to think he would have approved.

Sunshine on Leith

My heart was broken, my heart was broken 
Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow, sorrow 
My heart was broken, my heart was broken 

You saw it, you claimed it 
You touched it, you saved it 

My tears are drying, my tears are drying 
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you 
My tears are drying, my tears are drying 
[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/p/proclaimers/sunshine+on+leith_20111485.html ] 
Your beauty and kindness 
Made tears clear my blindness 
While I'm worth my room on this earth 
I will be with you 
While the chief, puts sunshine on Leith 
I'll thank him for his work 
And your birth and my birth. 

My heart was broken, my heart was broken 
Sorrow Sorrow Sorrow Sorrow 
My heart was broken, my heart was broken 

While I'm worth my room on this earth 
I will be with you 
While the chief, puts sunshine on Leith 
I'll thank him for his work 
And your birth and my birth. 

                                                          [lyrics from Lyricsfreak.com]

Sugar and spice

This week I have been enjoying my last days of museum teaching until January. The Geffrye Museum is looking gorgeously festive and is heaving with visitors. They all want to see the best of Christmas past; its rooms adorned with the winter decorations of bygone Londoners. Despite the crowds, everyone seems to love it - my school groups included.

I haven't been able to take my two children this year, but that hasn't stopped us from trying out a few festive making and baking traditions from the olden days.

We made Victorian Christmas tree decorations - bonbon filled cornucopia - as pictured above. These were very simple to recreate: the children cut gold doilies in half and then we folded them into cone shapes. After securing with a piece of sticky tape we attached shiny ribbon so they would hang like little baskets from the branches of our tree. And then came the most popular part - filling the cones with fruit jellies and pastilles. Beautiful.

We stepped back another 300 years to the winter celebrations of Elizabethan England and tried our hand at making sweetmeats. Authentic recipes would have used vast amounts of sugar - a real luxury then - in almond paste, milk jelly and crystallised fruit. These delicacies were flavoured with spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. Many sweetmeats were beautifully crafted into novelty shapes, and Marchpane was also popular. This looked rather like a flat marzipan cake, and was usually decorated with gold leaf.

Using marzipan for the base of our sweetmeats, we dusted our boards and rolling pins with snowy icing sugar and then had huge amounts of fun making our own novelty shaped celebratory treats.