Late for Lammas!

I missed Lammas this year. Well, I didn’t miss it, but I meant to post something about it on August 1 or 2, and now I’m a bit late. So this shall be a remembrance of Lammas, which is also known as Lughnasa, or in our modern world “the August bank holiday” in nations that were once part of the British empire, like Australia and Canada.

But what Lammas was and could be again is a First Fruits Festival—a celebration of the time when the harvest really gets rolling. Lughnasa is its Irish name, which comes from the Celtic sun god, Lugh. Lammas is actually the Christian name of the festival, from “Loaf-Mass,” because loaves of bread were baked from the first grain gleaned from the fields around this time.

In its pagan incarnation, it was a jolly Irish wake for Lugh, because the sun begins to get scarce again after the summer solstice. If you remember the old Traffic song “John Barleycorn Must Die,” there’s something of the same theme in it: the first of the grain is milled and baked into a loaf (or fermented and distilled into a cheering beverage). John Barleycorn dies so the people who depend on the grain can live through the winter.

So, it’s a holiday with some sad connotations, a time when we begin to say farewell to the warm growing season. But it’s not the end (that’s Samhain, or Hallowe’en, as we call it now) and there's still plenty of warmth and harvest left to come. In fact, it’s the perfect time to think about how to preserve all the goodness of summer fruits and vegetables for winter.

Let’s call it Lammas Week, time to start (if you haven't yet) pickling, canning, preserving, fermenting, blanching, freezing, and otherwise keeping John Barleycorn and his cousins, Tim Tomato and Gina Green Bean and Polly Pepper, all alive in our memories as well as in our freezers and pantries for many, many months to come.