In the sixteenth century, the Sunday preceding Easter Friday became known as Care Sunday, the word care being used to mean sorrow or grief. Because this Sunday was a part of Lent, certain foods\u2014including meat\u2014were proscribed, while others\u2014such as parched peas\u2014became traditional fare. The parching of the peas may have been intended to represent a desert-like aridity, appropriate since Lent is a commemoration of Jesus’s forty days in the wilderness. In time, these peas came to be known as curlings, a word formed from the care of Care Sunday and the suffix ling, which also appears in words such as gosling and darling. Eventually, the noun carling also gave rise to the verb carl, meaning to cook food by parching it. In Scotland, another sort of food also owes its name to Care Sunday: carcake, a small cake made with eggs and sometimes with blood, was originally baked and eaten as a sign of sorrow and repentance, but eventually came to be associated with the merrymaking of Shrove Tuesday. Likewise, shrove-cake was a cake given to children on Shrove Tuesday so that they would have something to eat while the adults celebrated God’s forgiveness of their past sins, and their carte blanche to commit entirely new ones.<\/p>\n
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In the sixteenth century, the Sunday preceding Easter Friday became known as Care Sunday, the word care being used to mean sorrow or grief. Because this Sunday was a part of Lent, certain foods\u2014including meat\u2014were proscribed, while others\u2014such as parched peas\u2014became traditional fare. The parching of the peas may have been intended to represent a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c"],"yoast_head":"\n