It’s 23 June, or Midsummer Eve, which can mean only one thing… YES, THAT’S RIGHT! Tonight’s the night when single women everywhere should make a cake with their own wee in order to attract a husband.
(Midsummer is different to the solstice — that’s when the North Pole is at its maximum tilt towards the sun, and we get the longest day, either 20 or 21 June. Midsummer is an old quarter day, the middle of the growing season, and is always 24 June. Anyway, back to the urine.)
You can make it on another auspicious day — St. Mark’s Eve on 24 April, St Agnes Eve (20 January) or Halloween, maybe — and ceremonies and recipes will vary, but if you’re a ‘spinster maid’, it’s the only sensible course of action.
Too much alt text, so here’s the full thing if you can’t see that image:
Three, or four, or more of you are to make a cake of half flour and half salt (no matter what flour it is) and some of every one of your own water, make this cake broad and thin, then every one of you either make a mark that you know or set the two first letters of your name on it with a pin or bodkin, but leave such a distance that it may be cut; then set it before the fire to bake, but all this while speak not a word. Turn it every one of you once, then let it bake a little more and then throw on every one a little salt and she that turn’d it first let her turn it again, then the person to be her husband will cut out her name and break it in two and give her one half, and so the next, and the next, till the last. If there be any so unfortunate to hear a bell, I wish I had them to my bedfellows this night to prevent leading apes in hell.
“Half flour and half salt” alone is enough to render this inedible, but it’s the “your own water” bit that perhaps best explains why it fell out of fashion. (Some recipes just say ‘water’, but where’s the fun in that?)
That version of the recipe is in a chapbook which first appeared in 1685, going by the name Mother Bunch’s Closet Newly Broke Open (obviously), republished two centuries later by folklorist Laurence Gomme.
There’s another one in Rev. M.C.F. Morris’s Yorkshire Folk-Talk of 1892. The vital ingredients always seem to be two or more women baking together, usually at midnight, and doing so in complete silence.
When you’re done, you divide the cake into equal portions and:
Charles Dack’s Weather and Folk Lore of Peterborough and District reckons “Two must make it, two bake it, two break it, and the third put a piece under each of their pillows”, but again, “Strict silence must be preserved.”
There are other ways to attract a man, of course. According to Mother Bunch, you can cavort about in a churchyard with a blade.
(Which rather begs the response: Listen — strange women prancing in churchyards waving swords is no basis for matrimonial bliss.)
Anyway, if you want to read more about this, you’ll be delighted to know that you can, either in the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, or The English Year — A month-by-month guide to the nation’s customs and festivals, from May Day to Mischief Night, by Steve Roud.
…or the Foods of England blog, which features Miss Arabella Whimsey, who tried it in 1870 and added her own twist by also sowing hemp-seed at midnight, saying:
Hemp-seed I sow, hemp-seed I lies, and he that is my true love come after me and mow!
She told the Leeds Mercury:
To be sure I did nothing all night but dream of Mr. Blossom … I looked back and saw him behind me, as plain as eyes could see him.
Hmmm, I think your relationship with hemp might involve more than just sowing seeds, Arabella.
Anyway, if you’re a tragically unmarried woman (like a fish without a bicycle), you know what to do this very evening: mates round, bake a cake, piss in the mix. Well, there are worse folk rituals.
Footnote: that folklorist, Laurence Gomme, was an early protector of threatened buildings, and pioneer of the blue plaque scheme — and the 800th plaque commemorated him.
