There is a school of thought in certain Bravian religious communities — more common, in my experience, in the interior provinces than in the port towns, and more common among people who have thought about the feast season in the abstract than among those who have actually fed a household through all seven days of it — that the Days of Unleavened Bread are properly a time of austerity at the table, and that sweet or celebratory baked goods are therefore somehow at odds with the character of the season. This view has always puzzled me, not because I am indifferent to the solemnity of the feast, but because I do not find solemnity and sweetness to be incompatible, and because the Scripture itself does not support the austerity position when it is examined carefully.
The feast that we observe during the Days of Unleavened Bread is not a fast. It is not a day of affliction in the sense of Yom Kippur, which is a commanded fast with specific prohibitions. It is a feast — one of the three great pilgrimage feasts of the Bravian year, a time when the second tithe is brought out and spent on whatever the observing household desires, on food and drink and the things that gladden the heart. The bread eaten during this feast is called the bread of affliction in Deuteronomy, but the affliction referred to is the affliction of our fathers in Egypt and the haste of their departure, not a prescription for an austere table in the present day. The feast commemorates a deliverance. Deliverance, in the Bravian understanding as in the biblical one, is cause for rejoicing and for the kind of eating that accompanies rejoicing.
I say all of this not to provide a theological justification for eating sweets, which would be a somewhat undignified use of theology, but to clear the air for the baker who has perhaps been told that sweet festival baking is out of place and who has wondered whether she is cutting corners on the solemnity of the season when she prepares a honey cake or a fruit-filled pastry round for her family’s table. She is not. She is feeding her family something good during a season that is meant to be, among other things, a pleasure. The constraint of the season is the removal of leavening, not the removal of joy, and there is no contradiction between the two.
Now: what does sweet baking look like in the Level 1 unleavened kitchen, and how does it differ from sweet baking in the ordinary year?
The answer, in broad terms, is less different than one might expect. The great majority of Bravian sweet preparations — the honey cakes, the fruit-filled pastries, the thin wafers and nut-and-seed bars that are made in Bravian households throughout the year — are either naturally unleavened or are lifted by chemical rather than biological means, and therefore transition to the Level 1 kitchen with minimal adjustment. The baker who has been making honey cake with baking powder throughout the year will find that her honey cake during the feast season is essentially the same preparation, and this continuity is itself a kind of pleasure: the feast table is different from the ordinary table in the most important ways while remaining recognizable and comforting in the details.
The differences that do exist are worth understanding before we encounter them in the recipes, because understanding them will allow the baker to adjust her expectations and her technique appropriately rather than being surprised by a result that diverges from what she is used to.
Sweet batters and doughs in the ordinary baking year often rely on biological leavening — yeast-raised sweet breads, enriched doughs leavened with sourdough culture — for both their lift and the complex flavor development that fermentation provides. At Level 1, these preparations are set aside entirely, and the sweet baked goods that remain are those whose lift comes from chemical or mechanical means and whose flavor comes from the ingredients themselves: from honey and fruit, from nuts and seeds, from warm spices and the natural sweetness of well-milled grain. This is not a diminishment. It is a different register of sweetness, one that is more direct and in many respects more honest than the complex, fermented sweetness of a yeasted sweet bread, and the baker who enters the Level 1 sweet kitchen with an open mind will find that register genuinely rewarding.
One practical note before we begin: sweet batters are more sensitive than savory ones to the balance of chemical leavening, because the sweetness of the batter amplifies any off-flavors that result from incorrectly measured or incorrectly balanced leavening agents. Too much baking soda in a savory flatbread produces a mildly unpleasant result. Too much baking soda in a honey cake produces a prominently soapy one. Measure carefully in the sweet preparations that follow, and use the quantities specified without adjustment unless you have a specific reason and a clear understanding of what the adjustment will do.
Recipe 11 — Bravian Festival Honey Cake
Level: 1 only
A note on this recipe: the festival honey cake is the sweet preparation most closely associated with the Days of Unleavened Bread in Bravian household tradition, and it is the preparation I am asked about most frequently by students who are observing the feast for the first time and want something on the table that signals celebration as clearly as the plain flatbread signals remembrance. The two belong together: the commemorative and the celebratory are both part of the feast, and a table that has only the bread of affliction and none of the sweetness of deliverance is telling only half the story.
This preparation is Level 1 only, because it depends on baking powder for the gentle lift that gives it its characteristic texture: not an airy, risen cake in the yeasted sense, but a cake that is tender and slightly open in its crumb rather than dense and close. The Level 2 honey preparation appears in Chapter 10, where the egg-white and beaten techniques available at that level produce a different but equally good result.
The honey cake of the Bravian festival tradition is not a cake in the sense of a tall, elaborately decorated presentation: it is a relatively flat, dense-ish square or round preparation, deeply golden from the honey and the eggs that color it, fragrant with warm spice, and with a crumb that is tender enough to be pleasant to eat without being so delicate that it crumbles at the touch. It keeps well for the full seven days of the feast — better, in fact, than most of the other sweet preparations in this chapter, because the honey’s hygroscopic character keeps the crumb from drying out as quickly as a sugar-sweetened cake would — and it improves slightly over the first two days after baking as the spice flavor develops and the honey distributes more evenly through the crumb.
My grandmother made this cake in a square iron pan that lived on a specific shelf in her pantry and came out only for the feast season, and the pan was seasoned from decades of annual use in a way that contributed its own quiet character to the result. I make it in the same pan, which my mother brought from her parents’ house when they died and which she eventually gave to me, and the pan is, at this point, more seasoning than iron. I do not recommend it as a technique so much as a family inheritance.
Makes one cake serving 10 to 12
Ingredients:
- 2 cups soft wheat flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- ½ teaspoon fine salt
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon ground ginger
- ¼ teaspoon ground cardamom
- ¼ teaspoon ground cloves
- ¾ cup good quality honey — the character of the honey matters considerably here and is worth choosing with some care; a mild floral honey produces a more delicate cake, while a dark, robustly flavored honey produces a more assertive and complex one; I use a local Western Reaches wildflower honey that sits between these extremes
- 3 eggs
- ½ cup olive oil or melted butter — olive oil produces a cake with a slightly savory undertone that is very Bravian in character and that pairs well with the honey; butter produces a more neutral richness that allows the honey and spice to speak without competition; both are correct
- ¼ cup fresh orange juice, or ¼ cup water with a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar if citrus is not available — the acid is necessary to activate the baking powder correctly and contributes a brightness that keeps the honey from becoming cloying
- Coarse honey for glazing, warmed until runny
Method:
Preheat the oven to moderate — not the high heat called for in the flatbread and cracker preparations, but a sustained, even moderate heat that will bake the cake through without scorching its honey-rich surface before the interior is set. Grease the baking pan generously with butter or oil, because honey cakes have a strong tendency to adhere to the pan as their sugars caramelize against the surface.
Combine the soft wheat flour, baking powder, salt, and all four spices in a large mixing bowl and stir thoroughly to distribute everything evenly. This dry mixing step is more important in the honey cake than in the savory preparations, because the spices must be evenly distributed through the flour before the wet ingredients are added. A clump of unmixed cinnamon in an otherwise correctly made cake will produce an unpleasant concentrated spot of bitterness in the finished product.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the honey, eggs, oil or butter, and orange juice until the mixture is smooth and uniform. The honey will resist combining with the eggs initially but will come around with persistent whisking. Do not beat this mixture to any significant aeration — this is a Level 1 preparation and moderate whisking for combination is appropriate, but you are not attempting to create a foam. You are simply ensuring that the ingredients are uniformly combined before they meet the flour.
Pour the wet mixture into the dry mixture and fold together with a broad wooden spoon or a flat spatula using as few strokes as necessary to produce a smooth batter. As with the biscuit bread of Chapter 5, restraint in the mixing of this batter produces a better result than thoroughness: the baking powder needs only that the batter be uniformly combined in order to function correctly, and overmixing develops gluten that makes the crumb tighter and less tender than it should be.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan. It should fill the pan to approximately three-quarters of its depth. Bake in the moderate oven for twenty-eight to thirty-five minutes, depending on the depth of your pan — a shallow pan will bake faster than a deep one, and the correct measure of doneness is not time but the behavior of the cake when a thin skewer or a clean straw is inserted into the center and withdrawn. The skewer should come out with no wet batter clinging to it, though a faint smear of moist crumb is acceptable and indeed desirable, because a completely dry skewer indicates that the cake has slightly overcooked.
While the cake is still warm from the oven, brush the surface generously with the warmed honey. The warm honey will soak into the surface of the cake rather than sitting on top of it, producing a slightly sticky, intensely fragrant glaze that is one of the most appealing things about this preparation. Allow the cake to cool in the pan for at least twenty minutes before cutting, because the crumb needs time to set around the structure provided by the eggs before it can be sliced cleanly.
This cake is best at room temperature, not warm. It is also, as I noted, slightly better on the second day than the first, and considerably better on the second day than it would have been on the first if it had been made with less honey or poorer honey than the recipe calls for.
On honey selection: The Bravian tradition of beekeeping is old and geographically varied, and the character of the local honey differs considerably across the provinces. The hill country produces a dark, strongly flavored honey from the pollen of wild thyme and mountain flowers that is excellent in a robust cake where its intensity is an asset. The Western coastal region, including the area around Porterville, produces a milder wildflower honey with a pleasant complexity that I find most versatile for baking. The Delta settlements are still developing their beekeeping traditions, but the honey produced in the river-enriched lowlands of that region has a distinctive quality from the pollen of the abundance of flowering plants that grows along the waterways, and early reports from bakers in those communities suggest it makes a particularly good cake. Choose the best honey available in your region and in your season, and do not economize on this ingredient, because it is carrying the flavor of the entire preparation.
A hill country variation: In some of the interior Amphoe communities and hill country households, the festival honey cake includes a tablespoon of finely grated dried lemon or orange rind in the batter alongside the warm spices, which adds a brightness that is particularly pleasant with the dark hill country honey. If citrus is available in your pantry, this addition is worth considering.
Recipe 12 — Fruit-Filled Pastry Rounds
Level: 1 and 2
A note on this recipe: the fruit-filled pastry round is the sweet counterpart to the savory hand pie of Chapter 6 and is made from essentially the same pastry shell dough, adjusted slightly in sweetness and fat content to suit a sweet filling. It is one of the preparations that most clearly demonstrates the versatility of the unleavened pastry dough: the same principles of cold fat in flour, careful hydration, and adequate resting time that produce a good savory pastry shell produce an equally good sweet one, with only minor adjustments to the formulation.
The Level 2 adaptation for this preparation is somewhat more demanding than the Level 2 adaptations in Chapter 6, because sweet fillings tend to be wetter than savory ones and the absence of chemical leavening means there is less structural help from the pastry during baking. The Level 2 baker should read the adaptation note carefully before beginning and should not attempt this preparation for the first time during the feast when the pressure of the festival kitchen is at its highest.
These pastry rounds are associated in my own experience with the middle days of the feast, when the fresh preparations of the first day have been eaten and the household is looking for something that feels genuinely festive rather than purely utilitarian. A basket of fruit-filled pastry rounds on the festival table is a simple pleasure that requires a moderate amount of preparation and produces a disproportionately large amount of satisfaction, which is an excellent ratio for a feast-season preparation.
Makes 10 rounds
For the sweet pastry shell:
Ingredients:
- 2 cups soft wheat flour
- ½ cup hard wheat flour
- ¼ teaspoon fine salt
- 1 tablespoon honey
- ½ teaspoon baking powder (omit for Level 2)
- 6 tablespoons cold butter, cut into cubes
- 1 egg, beaten
- 3 to 5 tablespoons cold water
Method:
Combine the flours, salt, and baking powder in a mixing bowl. Dissolve the honey in the beaten egg and set aside. Work the cold butter into the flour mixture with your fingertips to a coarse crumb, as in the savory pastry preparations of Chapter 6. Add the honey-egg mixture and three tablespoons of cold water and bring the dough together, adding more water gradually until it coheres. The sweet pastry dough should feel marginally softer than the savory pastry dough from Chapter 6, because the honey introduces additional moisture into the formula and the higher proportion of soft wheat flour produces a more extensible dough. If the dough feels correctly soft and slightly tacky after three tablespoons of water, do not add more.
Cover and rest for twenty minutes.
For the filling — Three Seasonal Variations:
The Bravian festival season falls in spring, and the fruit available in Bravian kitchens at this time of year reflects the season: the early spring pantry is still largely dependent on preserved and dried fruits from the previous autumn’s harvest, and the fresh fruits of the coming summer are not yet available except in the southernmost regions. The three fillings below reflect this seasonal reality and use ingredients that are available in Bravian households during the feast season regardless of region.
Filling A — Dried Fruit and Honey (available in all regions):
- 1½ cups mixed dried fruit — raisins, dried apricots, dried figs, or any combination, chopped small if the pieces are large
- 3 tablespoons honey
- ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
- ¼ teaspoon ground ginger
- 2 tablespoons water
Combine all ingredients in a small saucepan and cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, for eight to ten minutes until the fruit has softened and absorbed most of the liquid and the mixture has thickened to a jam-like consistency. Allow to cool completely before using. This filling can be prepared a day ahead and stored covered at room temperature.
Filling B — Preserved Grape and Walnut (associated with the interior Amphoe communities):
- 1 cup grape preserves or thick grape jam — made from the previous autumn’s grape harvest and common in Bravian households that maintain their own preserving tradition
- ½ cup walnuts, roughly chopped and toasted briefly in a dry pan
- ¼ teaspoon ground cardamom
Combine and stir until uniform. If the grape preserves are particularly sweet, a small squeeze of citrus juice or a few drops of apple cider vinegar will balance the sweetness without changing the character of the filling fundamentally. This filling requires no cooking and can be prepared immediately before use.
Filling C — Apple and Honey with Warm Spice (available in most regions, particularly the hill country):
- 3 medium cooking apples, peeled, cored, and cut into small pieces approximately the size of a thumbnail
- 3 tablespoons honey
- ½ teaspoon cinnamon
- ¼ teaspoon ground allspice
- Pinch of fine salt
Cook the apple pieces in a dry heavy pan over medium heat, stirring frequently, until they have softened and released their liquid. Continue cooking until most of the liquid has evaporated and the apple is nearly dry. Add the honey and spices, stir to combine, and cook for two more minutes until the mixture is thick and fragrant. Cool completely. This is the hill country variation and the one I find most appealing for its balance of sweetness, spice, and the slight tartness of a good cooking apple.
Assembly and baking:
Preheat the oven to moderate-to-hot. Divide the rested pastry dough into ten equal portions. Roll each portion on a lightly floured bench to a round of approximately six inches in diameter with an even thickness slightly greater than the pocket pastry from Chapter 6 but slightly less than the hand pie pastry.
Place a generous tablespoon of filling in the center of each round, leaving a border of approximately an inch around the edge. The sweet fillings in this recipe are denser and less prone to leaking than the savory fillings of Chapter 6, which gives slightly more latitude in filling quantity, but the same principle applies: do not overfill.
Fold and crimp the rounds as for the savory hand pies of Chapter 6, using the half-moon shape. For the sweet preparations, I prefer a decorative crimp made by folding and pressing the edge with a fork rather than the finger-fold used on the savory pies, which produces a more even and slightly finer seal that is more visually appropriate for a sweet preparation presented at the festival table. Cut a small slit in the top of each.
Brush the surface of each assembled round lightly with a small amount of beaten egg mixed with a teaspoon of honey thinned with water. This glaze will caramelize against the heat of the oven and produce a beautifully burnished, slightly sweet surface that distinguishes the sweet rounds visually from the savory preparations they resemble in structure.
Bake for eighteen to twenty-two minutes, until the pastry is deeply golden and the crimped edge shows some browning. Cool on a rack for ten minutes before serving. These are good at any temperature from warm to fully cooled, and they keep well at room temperature for up to two days.
Level 2 adaptation: Omit the baking powder from the pastry shell. Increase the cold butter to seven tablespoons and substitute two tablespoons of the cold water for cold cream or whole milk. The Level 2 sweet pastry will be richer and somewhat more delicate than the Level 1 version: handle it gently during rolling and assembly, and be aware that it is more prone to cracking at the fold than the Level 1 pastry. If cracking occurs during folding, allow the round to rest for three minutes before attempting to fold again. A pastry that has been given sufficient rest almost always folds without cracking; a pastry that is rushed almost always does not.
Recipe 13 — Thin Unleavened Wafer Cookies
Level: 1, 2, and 3
A note on this recipe: the unleavened wafer cookie is the preparation in this chapter that most directly straddles the boundary between all three levels of observance, and I have written it in a form that works without modification across all three. It contains no biological leavening and no chemical leavening and requires no beating or creaming of any kind — it is a thin, crisp, sweet preparation made from flour, fat, honey, egg, and aromatic flavoring, baked at high heat until crisp and fragrant, and it is genuinely excellent. I note this not to suggest that Level 1 bakers should feel obligated to observe a higher standard than their conviction requires, but simply to say that this particular preparation involves no sacrifice of quality in moving from Level 1 to Level 3 observance, and the baker at any level can make it without adjustment.
The wafer cookie of the Bravian festival tradition is, in character, more closely related to a thin crisp biscuit than to the soft, yielding cookies of the ordinary baking year. It is meant to be brittle and delicate, shattering cleanly when bitten, with a flavor that comes primarily from the honey and the aromatic addition — anise seed, in the hill country tradition; orange and cardamom in the coastal tradition; sesame in the Delta settlements — rather than from any leavening or filling. It is eaten on its own, with a cup of herbal tisane, or alongside the honey cake as part of a sweet festival spread, and it requires no accompaniment and no embellishment beyond what goes into the dough itself.
Makes approximately 40 wafers, depending on the size of your cutter
Ingredients:
- 1½ cups soft wheat flour
- ¼ teaspoon fine salt
- 3 tablespoons honey, warmed until very runny
- 3 tablespoons olive oil or melted butter
- 1 egg, beaten until just combined — not frothed, just broken down uniformly
- 2 tablespoons cold water
- Flavoring of choice, from the regional variations below
Method:
Combine the soft wheat flour and salt in a mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, stir together the warm honey, olive oil or melted butter, beaten egg, and cold water until the mixture is smooth and uniform. Add the chosen flavoring to the wet mixture. Pour the wet mixture into the flour and stir until a soft, slightly sticky dough forms. It will come together quickly.
Turn the dough onto a lightly floured bench and knead gently for one to two minutes, until the surface is smooth. The dough will be softer than the pastry doughs in this chapter and softer than most of the flatbread doughs: this softness is necessary for rolling very thin, and it is correct. Cover the dough and rest for fifteen minutes.
Preheat the oven to hot, with a baking stone or heavy baking sheet inside. Divide the rested dough into three portions. Working with one portion at a time and keeping the remainder covered, roll on a very lightly floured bench to the thinnest possible even sheet — thinner than the table crackers of Chapter 5, approaching translucency. The dough is soft and accommodating and will roll without significant resistance if it has been properly rested.
Cut into rounds or other shapes with a sharp-edged cutter. Transfer carefully to the preheated baking surface — the thin wafers are fragile and should be transferred using a broad, thin spatula rather than being lifted by hand. Bake for six to eight minutes, watching from the five-minute mark, until the wafers are evenly golden with some slightly darker coloring at the edges. They will crisp fully as they cool rather than in the oven, so judge doneness by color rather than by the texture of the hot wafer.
Transfer to a rack and cool completely before stacking or storing. The fully cooled wafers should be completely rigid and should snap cleanly when broken. If they are still slightly flexible after cooling, return them to a low oven for an additional five minutes to drive out the remaining moisture.
Store in a dry environment in a loosely covered container. They keep for five to six days.
Regional flavoring variations:
Hill country — Anise seed: Add one and a half teaspoons of whole anise seed to the wet mixture before combining with the flour. Anise seed is traditional in the older Bravian communities of the hill country, where it has been cultivated in kitchen gardens for generations and where its faintly medicinal, sweet-licorice character is considered appropriate to the contemplative character of the feast season. I find it particularly good when the wafers are served alongside the honey cake, because the anise provides a counterpoint to the honey’s sweetness that keeps the combination from being cloying.
Western coastal — Orange and cardamom: Add the finely grated zest of one orange and half a teaspoon of ground cardamom to the wet mixture. This is the flavoring I use in my own bakery for the festival wafers, partly because orange zest is readily available in the port-town markets and partly because the combination of citrus and cardamom is one of those straightforward pairings that produces a result considerably more interesting than its simplicity suggests. These wafers pair well with a soft fresh cheese and with fruit preparations.
Interior Amphoe — Cinnamon and dried fruit: Add half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and two tablespoons of very finely minced dried raisins to the wet mixture. The dried fruit pieces must be minced very finely — practically to a paste — because pieces that retain any significant size will create soft spots in the rolled wafer that prevent even crisping. A mortar and pestle is the most reliable tool for achieving the necessary fineness. These wafers have a slightly chewier texture at the points where the raisin has been incorporated, which is a pleasant textural variation that many tasters find surprising and appealing.
Delta settlement — Sesame: Add two tablespoons of sesame seeds, toasted until golden in a dry pan and cooled, to the wet mixture. Press additional sesame seeds lightly onto the surface of the rolled wafers before cutting. The sesame wafer is the simplest of the four regional variations in terms of flavoring and produces the most distinctly savory-sweet result, because sesame’s nutty, roasted character sits at the boundary between sweet and savory in a way that makes these wafers useful alongside either the sweet preparations of a festival spread or the savory preparations of the main table. They are the variation I find most universally appealing to guests from outside Bravia who are encountering unleavened festival baking for the first time, possibly because sesame’s flavor is familiar to a wider range of palates than anise or cardamom.
Recipe 14 — Nut-and-Seed Bars
Level: 1, 2, and 3
A note on this recipe: the nut-and-seed bar occupies a position in Bravian life that is simultaneously practical and celebratory, which is a combination that the Bravian character finds entirely natural and that the rest of the world sometimes finds surprising. It is provision food for Bravian colonists heading into the eastern settlements, ration food for the militia in the field, and festival table food for households throughout the nation during the feast season — all at once, without contradiction, because the Bravians have never seen any reason why food that is good enough for a festival table should be too good for a provision pack, or why food that is practical enough for a militia ration should not be served at the festival table.
The bar contains no leavening of any kind — biological, chemical, or mechanical — and is therefore appropriate across all three levels of observance without modification. It is also among the most nutritionally complete of the preparations in this book, because the combination of nuts, seeds, grain, and honey provides a substantial range of nutrients in a stable, portable, and genuinely good-tasting form. This is not an accident: the Bravian tradition of nut-and-seed bar production, which is particularly associated with the communities that produce the largest quantities of colonists and militia members, was developed with specific attention to nutritional completeness as well as flavor and keeping quality.
The bar is sweetened and bound entirely by honey, which serves simultaneously as sweetener, binder, and preservative, and which produces a bar that keeps at cool temperatures for up to two weeks without significant deterioration — considerably longer than any of the other sweet preparations in this chapter. This keeping quality, combined with the bar’s portability and nutritional density, is why it has always been the first preparation packed into a provision box and the last one eaten out of it.
Makes approximately 24 bars
Ingredients:
- 1 cup mixed whole nuts — walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, or any combination available, roughly chopped into pieces no smaller than a hazelnut half and no larger than a whole almond
- ½ cup sunflower seeds
- ½ cup sesame seeds
- ¼ cup pumpkin seeds or additional sunflower seeds if pumpkin seeds are not available
- ½ cup rolled or roughly crushed oats — note that oats are included here for binding and texture, not for leavening; they are appropriate at all three levels when used in this way, though the baker who has concerns about the inclusion of any grain product processed outside her own kitchen during the feast should substitute an additional quarter cup each of sunflower and sesame seeds to compensate
- ¼ teaspoon fine salt
- ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
- ¾ cup good honey
- 2 tablespoons rendered fat or butter, for greasing the pan and for incorporating into the honey syrup
Method:
Preheat the oven to moderate. Grease a rectangular baking pan — approximately nine by thirteen inches — generously with fat, and line the base with a piece of parchment or a clean cloth pressed flat, then grease the lining as well. The double greasing is not excessive: honey-based preparations adhere to baking surfaces with a tenacity that is remarkable, and the effort of preparing the pan thoroughly is considerably less than the effort of excavating a stuck bar preparation from an inadequately prepared one.
Combine the chopped nuts, all three seeds, the oats or seed substitute, salt, and cinnamon in a large mixing bowl and stir to distribute evenly. Spread this mixture on an ungreased baking sheet in a single layer and toast in the moderate oven for eight to ten minutes, stirring once at the midpoint, until the nuts are fragrant and have taken on a slightly deeper color and the sesame seeds are beginning to turn golden. Watch carefully from the eight-minute mark because nuts and sesame seeds go from toasted to scorched quickly and without much warning. Transfer the toasted mixture back to the mixing bowl immediately.
While the nut and seed mixture toasts, combine the honey and two tablespoons of fat in a small heavy saucepan over medium heat and cook, stirring, until the mixture reaches a temperature of approximately what I would describe as the soft ball stage — when a small drop of the syrup dropped into cold water can be gathered into a soft, pliable ball between the fingers. If you have a cooking thermometer, this is approximately 235 to 240 degrees on the Bravian scale, though I have made this preparation successfully for thirty years without ever using a thermometer for it, relying instead on the cold-water test, which is reliable and requires no equipment. The honey syrup at this stage will flow from a spoon in a thick, slow ribbon rather than in thin drops.
Pour the hot honey syrup over the toasted nut and seed mixture immediately. Stir quickly and thoroughly to coat every piece of nut and seed with the syrup. Work quickly because the syrup will begin to set as it cools and the mixture will become increasingly difficult to stir as it does so. Pour the coated mixture into the prepared pan and press it firmly and evenly into the pan using the back of a broad wooden spoon or the palm of your hand — oiled lightly, because the hot mixture will otherwise adhere to your skin with the same tenacity with which it adheres to an unprepared pan. Press firmly: a bar mixture that is not compressed adequately will crumble when cut rather than holding together cleanly.
Allow the pan to cool at room temperature for thirty minutes, then transfer to a cool location or to a cold cellar for an additional thirty minutes, until the mixture is fully set and firm throughout. Run a knife around the edges of the pan, invert the pan onto a cutting board, and peel away the parchment or cloth lining. Cut the slab into bars of the desired size — I make them approximately three inches by one and a half inches for provision purposes, and smaller, approximately two inches by one inch, for festival table use, where they are served alongside the wafer cookies and honey cake as part of a sweet spread.
The bars will be slightly tacky on the cut surfaces immediately after cutting. If they are to be stored or transported, allow the cut surfaces to dry for an hour at room temperature, then wrap individually in clean cloth or paper. Do not stack unwrapped bars, because they will adhere to each other and to anything else they contact.
Provision variation for extended storage: For bars intended for the militia provision pack or for the long sea voyages of the merchant marine, increase the honey by two tablespoons and reduce the fat to one tablespoon, which produces a drier, harder, and more shelf-stable bar at the cost of some tenderness. These provision bars are not as pleasant to eat as the table version, but they keep for three to four weeks in a dry cloth-lined provision box and provide reliable sustenance in field and sea conditions where no other food preparation is available.
Delta settlement variation: In the Delta communities where sesame is grown in abundance and where the influence of the Fremen communities has introduced certain flavoring traditions new to the Bravian kitchen, the nut-and-seed bar sometimes includes a tablespoon of finely ground dried chili pepper and a teaspoon of ground coriander seed alongside the cinnamon, producing a bar that is simultaneously sweet, nutty, and gently spiced in a way that is not quite like anything produced in any other Bravian region. I have been offered this version on my one visit to the Delta settlements and I found it unexpectedly appealing. I include it here as a variation rather than a primary formula because it has not yet made its way into the wider Bravian culinary tradition, but I suspect it will, because the Bravian palate is an adventurous one when it encounters something genuinely good, and the Delta variation is genuinely good.
A note on sourcing nuts during the feast season: The nut harvest in Bravia is an autumn event, which means that the nuts available during the spring feast season are necessarily those that have been stored from the previous autumn. Good stored nuts — kept dry and cool in their shells until needed, then shelled and used promptly — are perfectly satisfactory for this preparation. Poor stored nuts — those that have been shelled and left to oxidize over the winter, or that were not dried adequately before storage — will produce a bar with a stale, slightly rancid undertone that no amount of honey or spicing can correct, because the high heat of the honey syrup amplifies rather than masks the off-flavors of rancid fat. Taste your nuts before you begin and reject any that have an off character. This is not excessive caution. It is the kind of attention to ingredients that the Level 3 kitchen teaches and that serves the baker at every level and in every season.
A Closing Word on the Sweet Festival Kitchen
The preparations in this chapter span the full range of the Level 1 sweet kitchen, from the simple and quickly assembled — the herb oil flatbread of Chapter 6’s closing, the plain wafer cookie, the nut-and-seed bar that comes together in thirty minutes — to the more patient and deliberate honey cake and fruit-filled pastry rounds that reward an investment of time with a result of genuine depth. Together they make it possible to set a festival table that is both observant of the season and genuinely pleasurable to eat from across all seven days of the feast, which is exactly what the festival table should be.
I want to close this chapter with an observation that I have already made in slightly different form elsewhere in this book but that seems worth making once more in the context of the sweet kitchen, where the temptation to apologize for the absence of yeasted sweet breads and fermented preparations is perhaps strongest: the preparations in this chapter are not substitutes for something else. They are what they are. The honey cake is not a failed yeasted honey bread. The wafer cookie is not a compromise. The nut-and-seed bar is, as I have said, as good on a festival table as it is in a provision pack, which is to say it is very good indeed. The constraint of the season produced them, but they are not products of constraint in any diminished sense. They are products of a different and equally rich tradition of sweet baking, and that tradition belongs to the feast season as fully and as properly as the plain flatbread does.
Eat them with enjoyment. The feast is meant to be eaten that way.
Part Three: Level 2 Recipes — No Biological or Chemical Leavening begins on the following page.
