We need more holidays with bonfires.
Maybe not here in Southern California but in general
more bonfires.
England has Guy Fawkes Night, Ireland has Samhain and in Catalonia Spain
they have La Verbene de Sant Joan, or Saint John's Eve on June 23rd.
And in addition to bonfires they eat what we're making today, Coca de Sant Joan.
So thank you to my Patreon patron, Juan, for bringing this baked good to my attention
and letting me know a little bit about the holiday the Feast of Sant Joan,
this time on Tasting History.
Now for regular viewers of Tasting History you might have noticed that was a brand new opening.
It was made by viewer Matthew Bage so thank you so much for making that Matthew,
and thank you for letting me use it.
It's a little bit snazzier, definitely has a lot more images kind of updating the channel but
I made sure that we kept Der Völler in there. It's one of my favorite paintings
and we wouldn't be Tasting History without it.
Now as I mentioned today's episode is inspired
and kind of brought to you by my Patreon patron, my co-worker, old co-worker at Disney and my friend Juan Capdet.
It is pretty cool when your friends and co-workers support you like Juan has
so thank you very much Juan.
So Juan is from a region of Spain called Catalunya or Cataloña and in it
they celebrate this Feast of Sant Joan, or the Feast of Saint John. It's actually celebrated all over Europe,
but specifically he was telling me how they celebrate it in Cataloña and it sounds really cool,
kind of crazy but we'll get to that later. But every year they enjoy these cocas, coca de Sant Joan.
They're all different types of these kind of sweet flatbreads with different toppings and they
have all sorts of different toppings from kind of the savory llardon, or basically chicharrones, or
pork rinds, to pine nuts, to different nuts, to pastry cream and other sweets and then of
course candied fruit like the one that we're making today, and there are basically just as
many coca de Sant Joan as there are villages and bakeries in the region so it was hard to kind of
pick which one to do and it was also hard to find an old recipe.
I found several that
kind of worked so this recipe is kind of an amalgam of those old recipes from
the 1920s along with some of the more traditional ways of actually decorating the cake.
So for this coca what you'll need is: two and a half cups or 300 grams bread flour,
14 grams dry yeast, a half cup or 100 grams sugar,
4 tablespoons or 55 grams of lard or butter.
All of the old recipes use lard, that's what I'm going to be using, but butter works just as well.
Three eggs, two for the dough and one for an egg wash.
A half cup or 120 milliliters of whole milk,
the zest of half a lemon, a quarter cup or 60 milliliters of Anisette.
That is an anise flavored liqueur that also is rather sweet. So unlike sambuca which is just a
little bit sweet Anisette is much sweeter, so you can use that or you can just use some regular kind
of powdered anise in there iff you want. Just use a little bit though because it goes a long way.
A half teaspoon of salt. A quarter cup or 30 grams pine nuts,
and an assortment of candied fruit.
I'm using cherries, oranges pears and apricots but you can use whatever you want.
So first warm your milk to a bit above room temperature between 90 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 35 degrees Celsius,
and then dissolve the yeast in it and let it sit for about 10 minutes until it starts to foam.
You can also add a little bit of sugar in there to really get it going,
but once you know that it's nice and active add in all of the sugar and the eggs, and whisk to combine.
Then stir in the lemon zest and the Anisette.
In another bowl or in the bowl of a stand mixer.
You're going to want to use a stand mixer if you got one for this. Whisk together the flour and the
salt and then add the milk and yeast mixture, and mix it up until it comes together to form a dough.
Then little by little add the lard or the butter, and knead the dough until it's soft and smooth.
Then place it in a bowl and cover letting it rise until it doubles in size about 45 minutes.
Once risen place the dough on a lightly floured surface and stretch it into a rectangle.
Then place it on a lined baking sheet, and cover it lightly and let it rise for another 30 minutes.
Now during that second rise go ahead and preheat your oven to 350 Fahrenheit or 180 Celsius,
and pour yourself a glass of Cava, the traditional Cataloñan sparkling wine that is often drunk with the coca de Sant Joan.
It's also the perfect drink to learn a little bit about the Festival of Saint John.
That Time for History segment was also new.
Anyway after the fall of the Western Roman empire
Catholicism really started to spread across Europe and they had to battle with the pagan holidays
that were being celebrated and they did so mostly just by re-skinning them with
people from the Bible.
One of these holidays was midsummer or the summer solstice, longest day of the year.
Now Jesus's birthday had been set as December 25th at least as far back as 336 AD
just around the winter solstice which coincidentally is six months after the summer solstice,
go figure.
And in the Bible there just so happens to be a very important person born
about six months before Jesus,
"And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age:
and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren."
And that wee bairn born to Elizabeth was John, John the future baptist.
The dates lined up so they set his birthday at June 24th,
plus while Jesus's birthday marks the point in the year when the days start getting longer,
Saint John's birthday marks the point in the year when the days start to decrease in length which
lines up with something that John himself said.
"He must increase, but I must decrease."
Kind of perfect especially before they started kind of messing with the calendar making it so their birthdays
are actually like a few days off the solstices but don't worry about it.
Now as the Visigoth kings of the Iberian peninsula converted from Arian Christianity to Catholicism, it was time
to revamp some of those midsummer rituals to fall in line with this new Feast of Saint John.
Now we don't exactly know when most of these traditions started which have pagan roots and which don't but
there are some that we can pretty safely say were around before the conversion of the holiday.
First and perhaps most famous are the bonfires which I mentioned earlier.
In Cataloña there is a saying
"Sense foc no hi ha festa".
Without fire there is no festival, and they take that very seriously.
In fact in some towns in the Pyrenees
they would cut down the tallest tree and turn it into a big log and they would set it on fire,
hoist it up onto their shoulders, I don't really want to picture how they're doing that,
and parade it through the forest shedding sparks behind them.
Clearly Smokey the Bear never made it to Cataloña,
but in most of the region they were content to have their bonfires in city streets or on the beach.
And it was not limited to Cataloña it was actually really happening
all over and still does all over Europe.
In 13th century England a monk of Lilleshall Abbey wrote
"In the worship of St John men waken it even, and maken three manner of fires;
one is clean bones and no wood and is called a bonfire;
another is of clean wood and no bones, and is called a wakefire,
for men sitteth and wake by it; the third is made of bones and wood, and is called St John's Fire."
Today the fires are augmented by children and adults alike setting off massive quantities of fireworks.
But why? Why the fireworks? Why the bonfires? Why are they associated with this holiday?
Well for that it's back to the pagans.
Since time immemorial the summer solstice has been associated with magic.
Essentially on Saint John's eve you get +2 to any roles made to cast spells or brew potions,
and that's great if it's white magic or healing magic
but it's a two-way street.
For that night the veil between our world and the supernatural is at its thinnest
which means
"goblins and ghoulies"
and witches are on the prowl. And how do you ward off a witch?
Well, with a bonfire of course.
And these witches of Cataloña did not fly around on broomsticks or vacuum cleaners.
No! They would turn themselves into little bugs or birds and
fly above their victims dropping their potions onto them,
so when an ember would fly off from the bonfire it was thought to be a witch fleeing from the smoke and flames
but if the witch had got to you before the bonfire then it was up to you to save yourself by jumping over the bonfire,
sometimes multiple times, and the practice of fire jumping is still a thing that they do today.
Not a good night to be an EMT I'm sure.
Now another way to ward off witches was with herbs.
"On the vigil of St John the Baptist... every man's door being shadowed with green birch,
long fennel, St John's Wort, Orpin, white lilies, and such like,
garnished upon with garlands of beautiful flowers, had also lamps of glass with oil burning in them all the night."
Note that one of those herbs was called Saint John's Wort which gets its name from the fact that it was thought to
be most potent when picked on Saint John's eve and even in ancient times and medieval Europe
Saint John's wort was also known as a 'fuga daemonum', or devil chaser.
Be a really good name for a cocktail.
Now just as a witch's brew was at its most potent during the solstice
so were those medicines of healers that were made with herbs and other magic.
So if you had to get sick
mid-June was a good time to do it.
Now obviously witches were a concern wherever you went but
they seemed to be more of a problem in Cataloña where between the 15th and 18th century
they put on trial and killed more witches than any other region in the Iberian peninsula
and what's surprising is you would think that these trials would have come from the Spanish Inquisition
"Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"
but in fact they were mostly local witch hunts.
It was your friends and neighbors putting you on trial, and actually if you were accused of being a witch
your best chance was to have your case escalated to the Spanish Inquisition because for most of
the Inquisition's existence it was the belief in witches that was considered heresy.
So the person who was actually doing the accusing was more likely to be punished than the person who was accused,
and I shouldn't find this surprising seeing as it's a well-known fact that the Spanish Inquisition's chief weapon was
surprise.
Well surprise and fear.
"Had an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope."
Now while you or I might be down in the valley picking our Saint John's wort
on Saint John's eve the witches of Cataloña were often picking mint, basil, valerian,
and rue and dancing up at the peak of Pendraforca,
and I guess the idea of witches holding a sabbath
on a mountaintop on Saint John's eve was not unique to Cataloña because the original name of
Modest Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain", which should be playing right now,
was Saint John's Eve on Bald Mountain, albeit in Russian,
and it was about witches holding a sabbath and dancing up on top of Lysa Hora.
He also finished writing the piece on Saint John's eve.
Ooooooooooh, spooky.
Now witches aside there are other superstitions associated with the holiday in Cataloña.
Those include lighting red candles to make love spells more potent and running into the ocean,
sometimes naked, in the middle of the night and letting waves hit your back, and this is done
for either good luck, or for granting wishes, or for just washing the ick of the past year off you.
Which really ties into the whole John the Baptist thing. Actually casting off bad juju is something
that is associated with the holiday in general. In fact in many places you're supposed to start
those bonfires by throwing on your old furniture and belongings, the things that you don't need anymore.
It's kind of like Marie Condo on steroids, if it does not spark joy
let it spark the fire.
Now after a night of fire jumping, warding off witches and midnight dips in the ocean
you're gonna be hungry, and at some point we don't know exactly when, but at some point
eating coca became the thing to do.
"There is no celebration if the fire is not high.
If there are not a lot of kisses. Love cries out. Let people sing in the morning we will see the sun,
and we will have eaten coca with llardons."
Now the coca started out round symbolizing the sun,
but as time went on they started getting longer. Some people say that they need to be
two units in length for every one unit in width to symbolize the twice as many hours of daylight versus
hours of night at the summer solstice.
I don't know. What I do know is that by the end of the
19th century they were getting longer, much longer.
There are stories of villages competing to see who could make the longest coca,
and it's described that they would make them so long
that they would have to put them into like an open wood fire and bake half of it,
and then pull it out flip it around and bake the other half.
"Then the young men hoisted the cake on their shoulders
and walked through the neighborhoods to show it off."
Young men and their coca measuring contests. Some things just never change.
Now I don't have anything to prove so I am fine with my more traditional two to one ratio of a coca
which should be about ready to decorate and bake.
So once your coca has puffed up a bit,
brush on an egg wash and decorate it with candied fruit and the pine nuts.
You can also add a bit more sugar if you want a little sparkle,
then bake it for 20 minutes or until it's golden brown.
And here we are Coca de Sant Joan.
So it smells awesome. It definitely has that kind of anise smell to it
which I worry because I'm actually not a huge fan of anise but let's give it a shot.
:O *Chomp
So I can taste the anise but it is not overpowering it actually smells
more than it tastes, granted I got a piece of the fruit so
that sweetness really overpowers it so i'm going to just try a little bit uh just of the bread.
Even then it's not overpowering. The anise is there but the sweet kind of
covers it over a little bit but it's also not particularly sweet. It's not as sweet as
as most like dessert breads it's more like a brioche but it's not as pillowy.
It's a little bit more chewy which I kind of like.
It actually really reminds me of king cake
which I should do here on the channel. Very, very similar especially with the candied fruit and the pine nuts,
which pine nuts are actually really good when just a little bit warmed like that.
I was worried that the candied fruit would burn with all the sugar but it doesn't maybe
if it was at a higher temperature it might but it really comes out perfectly and actually it
cuts through the candied fruit really, really well which I'm surprised at.
Mostly now I'm just curious about the other flavors.
I kind of want to make it again with the llardon or the chicharrones because
I think that would be kind of interesting.
So thank you again to Juan and to all of my Patreon patrons
and if you make your own coca which you should make sure to share a picture with me on Instagram
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
I didn't think I liked candy fruit but I was wrong.
[Muffled] This is really good.