The history of bread : from pre-historic to modern times / by John Ashton.
- John Ashton
- Date:
- 1904
Licence: In copyright
Credit: The history of bread : from pre-historic to modern times / by John Ashton. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.
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![all their pleasing associations, it was a source of gratifying reflection to see my old favourites thus brought into intimate association with the pious thoughts of the primitive Christians, and to know that at home we cherished an ancient usage on Good Friday which the more Catholic nations of Europe no longer observed. But, alas ! there is always some drawback to our full satisfaction in this world, and knowledge is often a cruel dissipation of favourite convictions ; my faith in the Christian biography of these buns has recently received a very rude shock. ‘ It would appear that they have descended to us, not from any Popish practice, as some pious souls affirm, but from one which was actually, and, like the word which we use to signify the great festival of the Church, Easter, to a paganism as ancient as the worship of Astarte; in honour of whom, about the time of the Passover, our pagan ancestors, the Saxons, baked and offered up a particular kind of cake. We read in Jeremiah (vii. 17, 18): “ Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the Queen of Heaven.” [See also Jeremiah xliv. 18, 19.] Dr. Stukeley, in his Medallic History of Valerius Carausius, remarks that they were “ assiduous to knead the Easter cakes for her service.” The worship of a Queen of Heaven, under some significant name or other, was an almost universal practice, and exists still in various parts of the globe. She is usually represented, like the Madonna, bearing her son in her lap, or like Isis, with](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21538682_0155.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
