The mother of all Sundays

A recipe for Crab Tart - with The Best pastry

Photo by Liv Bruce on Unsplash

It’s Mother’s Day this Sunday. Before readers in the US blanch with shock, it’s the UK’s Mother’s Day, a religious not a commercial festival. Always celebrated on the fourth Sunday in Lent, Mothering Sunday is its correct title, the day when traditionally people returned to the ‘mother’ church in which they were baptised.

In the days when the British aristocracy and landed gentry of portraits by Gainsborough and BBC costume dramas were reluctant to give their staff any time off, they had at least to let them go back to their villages on this one day of the year, to pay their respects to their mother church. Since those churches were in the places where they had been born, it gave them the opportunity also to visit their physical mothers.

They may have picked daffodils from the hedgerows to take to them, flowers apparently always being what women want, though I can’t find any research to establish who asked any of us if this is the case. According to the New York Times, the best presents to bring on Mother’s Day are gardening books, water colours (the kit or a painting isn’t clear), socks, red clogs, a custom mug, sunglasses, or a lotion bar. These are among the gifts chosen last year by Samantha Schoech, a writer ‘focusing on gifts’ who ‘spends her time finding things that combine quality, beauty, usefulness, and delight.’

I’m looking forward to my red clogs and with more delight to discovering what declaration has been picked for my custom mug.

In its early days, American Mother’s Day wasn’t a commercial enterprise either. It was established by Anna Jarvis on the second Sunday in May, 1908, in Grafton, West Virginia, with a service at St Andrew’s Methodist Church. It arose from her mother’s efforts in 1868 to organise Mother's Friendship Day to reunite families divided by the Civil War.

I would delight in Anna Jarvis’s hat

What I object to about Mother’s Day (as opposed to Mothering Sunday about which I have no opinion), is that it’s like International Women’s Day: Why not every day? What would be achieved without us?

As to the latter, I always thought International Women’s Day had something to do with the Russian Revolution. But no, it’s American in origin, too, though it did originate when Russians were first, umm, revolting. Only officially endorsed as a global event in 1975, its seed was sown in 1908 when 15,000 women took to the streets of New York in protest at their appalling work conditions. A year later, the Socialist Party of America announced a National Women’s Day to honour the strikers. Then in 1910 the Socialist International voted for the creation of an official Women’s Day to advocate for suffrage. When the first International Women’s Day was celebrated in 1911, across Europe over a million people rallied to demand women’s rights.

Like Mother’s Day for childless women or women who have lost their mothers, International Women’s Day pretty much passed me by unnoticed until I was living in Moscow. Fireworks were let off. Florists outside cemeteries were crowded with men buying up bunches of red carnations or red tulips, the only flowers available in early March and cemeteries their only source.

Growing up in England, Mother’s Day was not much more exuberant. British children were expected only to put crayon to school paper. When we grew old enough not to burn the house down, we were supposed to make breakfast and ferry it up on a tray to mothers allowed to languish this one morning in bed. That was it. Red clogs would probably have been more welcome than the burnt toast and thin tea which my mother, who didn’t eat breakfast and only drank coffee, was presented with.

Given both Mother’s Day and International Women’s Day celebrate just under 50 percent of the human race, it’s curious that despite them both being occasions to demonstrate obligatory appreciation of the people most associated with meal preparation, there is no official dish associated with either. Christmas and Thanksgiving have their turkeys, Easter has any number of related cakes and chocolate confectionery. Once upon a time, Simnel cake, a type of fruit cake not unlike Christmas cake but lighter and covered in marzipan but not icing, was the cake for Mothering Sunday, offering a break from the Lenten fast. But now even that is lost to mothers, a cake now associated only with Easter.

For religious festivals in Middle Eastern, Oriental, African and Asian cultures, families spend days in food preparation. Mothering Sunday is a religious festival. But try as I might, I’ve found no UK food-related activities. In Mexico, Dia de Las Madres falls on 10 May when mothers are taken out to restaurants where mariachi bands sing mother-related songs of praise to them. (I might prefer the red clogs.) In Ethiopia, mothers are celebrated during Antrosht, an early autumn festival three-days long at the end of the rainy season, with feastings on meat, vegetables and cheese dishes, and singing and dancing.

But in other countries, it is a gloomy event. Much in the spirit of Anna Jarvis’s mother, Mother’s Day in Japan, falling on the second Sunday in May, is a day dedicated to comforting mothers who lost their sons in the Second World War by presenting them with carnations. In Peru, families gather on Mother’s Day in cemeteries to honour dead mothers.

Mrs Jarvis might be astonished by just how swiftly and significantly American Mother’s Day became a substantial commercial enterprise. It will be celebrated this year by presents amounting to over $25 billion, the figure for 2019. By contrast, the amount projected to be spent this year on UK mothers is a measly £1.57 billion, red clogs being unlikely to feature on British mothers’ wish lists.

Because I feel quite crabby about this and the brevity of both those women-focused appreciations, I give you Crab Tart, a perfect dish for Mother’s Day in the UK and in the US because anyone can make it for a mother very easily.

Whether you fill the tart with crab or something else, I do commend to you the pastry part of the recipe. It is exceptional - short and light. I can boast about it because it isn’t mine. I’ve stolen the recipe wholesale from restaurateur and chef Rick Stein. As to the ingredient reference to brown crab meat, American cooks can ignore that, American crabs being a species lacking the brown meat of European crabs. While I’ve made mine in an oblong loose-bottom tart tin, the recipe will fill 4 individual tins 11cm/4½in in size.

225g/8 oz plain flour
½ teaspoon salt
65g/2½ oz butter
65g/2½ oz lard
1½ tablespoon cold water
1 egg white

225g/8 oz white crab meat
50g/2 oz brown crab meat
2 egg yolks
85ml/3 fl oz double/heavy cream
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
50g/2oz Gruyère cheese, finely grated
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Sift the flour and salt together, add the butter and lard cut into small pieces and rub until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. This can be done in a food processor. Tip into a large mixing bowl and stir in the water with a table knife until everything starts to stick together. Bring together into a ball, turn out on to a work surface lightly dusted with flour and knead once or twice until smooth. Roll out the pastry thinly and line your chosen tin/s. Chill for 20 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 220C/425F.

Line the pastry case/s with crumpled greaseproof paper, cover the base with a generous layer of baking beans and bake blind for 15 minutes. Remove the paper and beans, brush the inside of the pastry with a little unbeaten egg white and return to the oven for 2 minutes.

Remove from the oven and lower the temperature to 200C/400F.

Mix the crab meat with the egg yolks, cream, cayenne and some salt and pepper. Spoon the mixture over the pastry and sprinkle with the grated Gruyère cheese.

Bake at the top of the oven for 15-20 minutes, until lightly golden and serve.