Boons, moons and Venus

This week we had a boon day at the Heron Corn Mill. What happens is that any mill friends and supporters who can spare some time come along to help tidy the mill up ready for the new season. A spring clean, in effect. I'd never really quite understood why it was called a boon day, so I reached for my old friend the OED to see what the word really means.

According to the OED, a boon started out as either a prayer to God or a request to a person. Here's somebody in 1175 with what reads like a good northern accent asking God to hear his prayer -

c1175   Lamb. Hom. 63   Ah lauerd god, her ure bone.

Spelling has moved on a bit since 1175. A couple of hundred years later, Chaucer has the king kindly granting somebody's request -

c1385   Chaucer Legend Good Women 1592   The kyng assentede to his bone

By the seventeenth century, the lord of the manor had got it all tied up -

  boon-day  n.1679   T. Blount Fragmenta Antiquitatis 153   The custom was here for the Natives and Cottagers to plow and harrow for the Lord, and to work one boon-day for him every week in Harvest.

So we all came along to the mill to give a bit of our time for the good of the mill. My job this time was to provide 19 lunches for the staff and volunteers. We had fresh bread and butter, soup or pasta, and bean and potato stew. Jamie Oliver would have approved (with his school meals hat on), because it was all done for about £1 a head. And purely vegan if you didn't butter your royal slice of bread.

Preston Guild

Language, like bean stew, is very rich, and everyday things often acquire local nicknames. Take the idea of something being an unusual or rare event, for instance. Up north, if something happens once every twenty years, it happens once in a Preston Guild. That's because the Preston Guilds are celebrated every twenty years. This was the celebration in 1902, which implies the next one is in 4 years' time.

[I now know that there was no Preston Guild celebration in 1942, because of the war. That was the first time since 1542 that the tradition was not observed. The date was pushed back by 10 years to 1952, and there has been a Preston Guild every 20 years since then. So the next celebration will be in 2032, not 2022 as I wrongly assumed.]

A friend of mine had a bar job during a Preston Guild, and by the sound of it the celebrations were prodigious. He learned a good life lesson: never wear a tie behind a bar, because thirsty drinkers can drag you over the counter by it to draw your attention to their empty glasses. Northern people are very direct like that sometimes.

If there is no local equivalent to the Preston Guild, people tend to use fantastic ideas to suggest how long it may be before something happens. On the Persian gulf, you might say إذا حجت البقرة على قرونها  which I'm sure you know means "when the cow goes on pilgrimage on its horns". Where I grew up in Manchester, waiting for anything for a long time was always "like waiting for a number 62 bus".

A month of Sundays

Things which are unlikely ever to happen may be said to happen "never in a month of sundays" (England), or "when pigs fly" (Germany) or "on the 31st February" (Italy). Even the Romans showed a dry sense of humour, describing "never" as "ad kalendas graecas". The Greek calendar has no idea of the calends or first of the month. The Spanish take a more laid back approach, putting things off till "mañana" which might mean tomorrow as in "jam tomorrow", or it might mean "sometime never".

Blue moon

If something does actually occur, but only very infrequently, it happens once in a blue moon. But how frequent is a blue moon? Actually it is just a second full moon in a calendar month. With up to 31 days in a calendar month, and 29.5 in a lunar month, it's not so very rare. There are 7 blue moons this decade, according to Wikipedia. Blue moons aren't necessarily blue either, so the colour thing is a bit of a red herring (see what I did there?) - it's just two full moons in a month.

This month we had a super blue blood moon. So what it that all about?

Super moon

The moon has an elliptical orbit round the earth, so sometimes it is nearer the earth, and sometimes it is further away. A super moon is when the moon happens to be full when it is at its closest point to the earth. Again, this is not really that rare. There is roughly a one in thirty chance that the moon will happen to be full on any day.

A super moon causes super tides, or perigean spring tides. This time the tide left parts of Venice high and dry -

Blood moon

I have long been troubled by the scene in Berg's opera Wozzeck where the murderous hero goes off into the night talking about the moon and everything being the colour of blood.

(Der Mond bricht blutrot hinter den Wolken hervor. Wozzeck blickt auf)
Aber der Mond verrät mich ... der Mond ist blutig.

(The moon breaks blood-red behind the clouds Wozzeck looks up)
But the moon betrays me ... the moon is bloody.

Unlike a blue moon which is not blue, a blood moon really is red. It happens when there is a lunar eclipse. A lunar eclipse is when the earth comes between the sun and the moon. (The sun will never come between the earth and the moon in a month of sundays, of course!)

The reason why the moon appears red during a lunar eclipse is to do with the earth's atmosphere. Light from the sun has to pass through the earth's atmosphere on the way to the moon. The atmosphere hampers the blue part of the sunlight more than it hampers the red part. As a result, some of the blue light gets bent away from the moon, and the light that gets through has a higher ratio than normal of red light to blue light. So when that light bounces back off the moon and we see it from earth, it appears redder than normal - or less blue if you like.

So maybe that was what Wozzeck was seeing in the opera. Or then again, maybe it was just his guilty conscience. He had just murdered the opera's heroine Marie after all.

How rare is a super blue blood moon then? I'd say it was about as rare as hen's teeth. People from Georgia might say it will happen "when the donkey climbs the tree". In China it might be "when the sun rises in the west".

So what?

But what has any of this to do with food, I hear you ask. Well, not a lot, I suppose. But like Manchester buses, rare events don't come singly, and it was rather a grand week when not only did we have a super blue blood moon, but Venus Turkish supermarket in Manchester had some big beans on the shelf.

This was a bit of a mixed blessing, as I recently ordered a vast consignment of big beans by post from a supermarket in London. Still, I paid £2.69 including delivery, and these were £3.29, so I suppose I got a result. It really is a red letter day when you find these beans on the shelf anywhere up north - this was the second time at Venus, and I've never seen them anywhere else.

Venus revisited

I have recommended Venus before, and it is still worth a visit whenever you happen to be in Manchester. This time they had a marvellous selection of fresh dates on offer. There were three different brands of the soft luscious Iranian dates, two kinds of Palestinian dates, and some Tunisian ones. In the same display they had several kinds of dried figs from Greece and Turkey, and some dried dates as well. Really fantastic! I came away with £7 worth of dates - 3 700g boxes of Iranians and a 400g tray of Tunisians.

The dried herb offering is also outstanding at Venus. I regularly stock up with generous 80g bags at 89p each. As well as single herbs, there are several really good kinds of mixed herbs, mostly with names like "sabzi polo", "sabzi gourmeh", "sabzi ashe" and rather charmingly "sabzi kookoo".

Venus is a real Aladin's cave, with all sorts of weird and wonderful things on offer. The tinned vegetable aisle is astonishing, stacked high with aubergines, peppers and pickles of all descriptions. And the sheep's heads on the butcher's counter hold a fascination for me. And don't get me started on roasted and salted seeds.

There is usually a bargain or two to be had in the olive oil department. This time I got a 5 litre tin of Kolymvari Gold, a very good olive oil from Kolymvari on the north west corner of Crete, for £4.75 a litre, which is pretty well unbeatable value, in my book.

Not everything is as keenly priced however. The vast array of chickpeas all come in at about £3 a kilo, which I find hard to justify when the Unicorn co-op in Chorlton is offering organic chickpeas for £2 a kilo. The ones in Venus actually specify the size of the chickpeas - typically 9mm - which is significantly larger than most. I have to say that on the one occasion I bought some of these large chickpeas they were actually extremely good.

The Unicorn celebrated

I was very happy to hear that the Unicorn co-op in Manchester won the BBC food and farming award for the best food retailer this year. I have been a fan for a long time, and they really deserve the recognition.

As well as the chickpeas, the Unicorn has some highly competitive prices on other items. Dove's flour, for instance, which is £2.30 a bag in my local supermarket, is £1.59 in the Unicorn. How do they manage that with only one shop?

The fresh fruit and veg are exclusively organic at the Unicorn, and always really fresh. And yet it is by no means expensive. You can choose from about 6 organic potatoes, all at 86p a kilo. Try doing that in the supermarket!

Bury market - muffin mecca

No trip to Manchester is really complete without a trip to Bury market. It is de rigeur to go and stand by the black pudding stall, and marvel at all those lumps of fat in the admittedly delicious puddings. I generally bottle out of buying one, though.

There is a very good deli in the indoor market, but their queue is always very long,and the time and motion people would have something to say about how they handle it. It's a shame, because they have a good cheese offering. I got mine outside in the rain this time - proper creamy and tasty Lancashire, which sadly seems to be largely impossible to find north of Preston these days. Beware imitations.

Given my recent muffin obsession, I was rather thrilled to see this place on the market -

Muffin is a bit of a misnomer here, because they are really selling oven bottom cakes - much loved locally, but made with such poor flour that only the shape survives from the days of the brick-built, wood fired bread oven. They are now just soft bread rolls, made in a traditional flat shape. In other parts of the country they might be called baps or stotties. 

The jewel in the crown of Bury market is the excellent fish and meat hall. I came away with a beautifully fresh dressed crab, quite a big one too, for £3.80 from this stall -

I also bought enough really fresh mussels for one healthy appetite for £1.80. I only had to discard one at the cleaning stage, and only one failed to open in the pan. Good stuff!

There were also very good looking whole salmon ranging from £13 to £24 depending on size, and Arbroath smokies at £9.60 a kilo, which in itself would make a good excuse for a visit.

End of an era?

The final thing that surprised me on this visit to Manchester was to find that my old favourite curry house is to be demolished. The Al Faisal may not look like much from the outside, but as another customer said, it is a Manchester institution. I've been eating here for about 25 years - always the same few dishes, served with a jug of corporation pop and a naan bread freshly cooked on the inside of the tandoor. And now it is to be knocked down. I really felt my mortality, I can tell you!

Not to worry though: it is opening up in a different building across the road -