1 large head cabbage

1 cup brown basmati rice

½-1 teaspoon salt

olive oil

1 large onion, minced

2 carrots, shredded

2 stalks celery, shredded

1 bunch parsley, minced

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 package soysage (LiteLife’s “Gimme Lean” is the best, in my opinion)

½-1 cup roasted almonds, chopped

2 large cans tomatoes (or 3-4 pounds fresh tomatoes, peeled and chopped)

tamari

turbinado sugar

lemon juice

black pepper

To prepare the cabbage:

Give the bottom of the cabbage a good solid thonk on the floor and, with a knife, remove as much of the core as possible. Steam the cabbage, whole, in a covered pot with about 1 inch of boiling water in the bottom. As the outer leaves soften, remove them (you can usually take off 3-4 at a time) and set them aside to cool. Watch your hands on the hot steam and be careful not to tear the leaves. When the leaves get to be smaller than the palm of your hand, take what’s left of the head out of the pot, halve and core it, and shred it into sauerkraut-sized shreds. Reserve the cabbage water.

When the leaves have cooled a bit, pare off the big vein on the outside, being careful not to cut through the leaf itself.

To prepare the rice:

Dry-roast the brown basmati in a skillet until it begins to toast and pop. It will smell delicious. Cook as usual with 2 cups water (you can use some of the cabbage water here) and salt, if desired.

To prepare the stuffing:

Saute the onion in olive oil until it begins to wilt. Add shredded carrot and celery and sauté until they begin to brown. Crumble soysage into the pan and continue sautéing a few minutes. Add the rice, parsley, oregano, and almonds, and stir until everything is well-mixed. Add 1-2 cups tomatoes, with juice, and stir until most of the liquid is absorbed. Season to taste with pepper and tamari.

To stuff the cabbage leaves:

Put a cabbage leaf in the palm of your hand, with the outer side down. Dollop 1-3 tablespoons of filling into the middle of the leaf (the amount will depend on how big the leaf is.) Pull the stem end of the leaf over until it completely covers the filling. Then fold in the sides, and roll towards the top of the leaf. You should have a nice, tight little package with no stuffing showing at all. Place in baking dish or casserole (be sure to use one with a cover) and continue until you’ve used up all of the filling or all the cabbage leaves, whichever comes first. (There’s no need to oil the baking dish.)

If there are extra cabbage leaves, shred them now and strew them with the rest of the shredded cabbage over top of the cabbage rolls. If there’s extra filling, eat it for lunch.

To prepare the tomato topping:

Mix the remaining chopped tomatoes with sugar, lemon juice, tamari, and pepper to taste.

It should be fairly juicy; add cabbage water if it’s too dry. Pour over top of the cabbage rolls. Bake, covered, at 350° for 1½-2 hours. Check periodically towards the end of the baking period; add water if necessary.

The cabbage rolls are done when you can pierce them easily with the tines of a fork.

Serves 13 (of course).

The form that it takes is simple: whole grains (wheat, barley, rice) boiled in liquid (milk, water, almond milk), sweetened with honey, enriched with nuts and/or dried fruits. In Poland, it’s said to date from the time “before there were mills to grind the grain.” Ancestral to England’s plum pudding (frumenty, as it was called, was an invariable part of the medieval English Yule-board), the origin of Scandinavia’s Yuletide rice puddings, the recipe surely dates back to—if not precedes—the advent of agriculture.

Remember that the ancestors didn’t get sweets very often, and probably reserved them for the highest of holidays (such as the Winter Solstice, a date of major significance to agricultural communities virtually everywhere). Then the standard boiled-grain pottage that everyone ate everyday would be embellished with a hoarded lump of honeycomb in honor of the occasion. Bear in mind also that virtually everywhere religious ritual tends to preserve archaic cultural forms that have otherwise died out in everyday usage.

So it’s more than possible—likely even—that this dish may date to Neolithic times, perhaps to the very discovery of cereal agriculture itself, more than 11,000 years ago.

Below is the version that my coven serves on Midwinter’s Eve, based originally on a Russian recipe. It’s the first dish in our thirteen-course Yule feast (one course for each moon of the coming year). By the light of a lone beeswax taper thrust into the middle of the pudding, we ritually renew our familial solidarity by together eating from the shared central bowl, just as our ancestors did more than ten thousand years ago.

Kutyá: Yule Wheat

1 cup wheat berries

2 cups blanched almonds

½ teaspoon salt

¼ cup whole blue poppy seeds

3-5 tablespoons honey

1 tablespoon rose water

Soak wheat berries overnight in water to cover. In a separate bowl, soak 1½ cups of the almonds in 3 cups of water, also overnight.

Next day, puree the soaked almonds with their soaking water. Add 3 more cups of water to the puree and strain through a cloth, wringing well to extract as much almond milk as possible (I use an old pillowcase). Discard almond pulp.

In a non-reactive pan, bring drained wheat berries and almond milk to a simmer. Lower heat and continue cooking until wheat berries become tender (this is likely to take 2-3 hours, depending on the age and variety of the wheat berries). You’ll need to stir frequently (sunwise only, please!), especially towards the end of the cooking as the almond milk thickens. When the wheat berries are tooth-tender, add poppy seeds and salt, and cook 15-20 minutes more.

During the cooking, dry roast the remaining ½ cup almonds until golden brown, either in a skillet (stirring constantly) or in a 325° oven; this will take approximately 5 to 7 minutes.

Sweeten the kutya with honey to taste, and stir in rose water. Turn out into serving bowl, and garnish with dry-roasted almonds. Serve hot, room temperature, or chilled.

Serves 13. (Of course.)

© Steven Posch

Fiction:

Alan Garner, Thursbitch (London: Vintage, 2004)

This is Alan Garner of Weirdstone of Brisingamen fame, all grown up, and has he ever got a tale to tell. If there had been an amanita-chewing, bull-worshipping Dionysiac cult still alive in 17^th-century Cheshire (!), complete with songs, prayers, invocations, and proverbs, what would it have looked—and more importantly, sounded—like? Here it is, and he’s such a word-wizard that he almost makes it work. He doesn’t get everything right, of course, but he goes farther than anyone else. “There’s nowt as He’s not” (proverb). “O Bonny Bull, come thy ways” (invocation). This book is entirely about what English would have been like if it had been continuously spoken by our kind of people, filled with material you’ll want to learn and use. Standard English, for example, doesn’t distinguish between a place where three and four roads meet; “crossroads” can mean either. Witches’ English, however—as one might expect—does distinguish between a “three-went” and a “four-went” respectively.

This is no easy read, Garner being a master of what’s not said. Be ready to read between the lines. But it’s richly worth the work: his words will sing in your head for days. All this so deeply rooted in the Cheshire landscape that it’ll make your American heart break with envy. The name of a standing stone in a field near where Garner grew up was “the Bull Stang.” I shit you not.

Allan Moore, Voice of the Fire (London: Indigo, 1997)

The British Songlines. Moore is the pagan James Michner (but can out-write Michner any day of the year). A dozen pungent Guy Fawkes/Samhain tales set in Northampton and environs from (literally) 4000 BCE to the present. The clearest articulation of the role of the Man-in-Black/witchman that I’ve ever seen (he calls him the “Hob” or “Hobman.”) Filled with November fires, severed heads, and giant black dogs. (He’s got an explanation for the Templar Head that you will never—I promise—forget.) Another book so deeply immersed in local lore it’ll make your teeth ache with envy.

This is yet another one with language as dense and rich as a Samhain fruitcake, studded with chewy nutmeats and piquant dried fruit. I hereby nominate “You’re wrong like Hob’s Hog” for “Craft proverb” status. (But you’ll have to read the book to find out what it means.) The opening story is the hardest, written in what English might have sounded like if it had been spoken 6000 years ago. It’s challenging, but persevere: force yourself to slow down and give the text time. Read aloud, if you need to. (It really does get easier, and the first story’s the hardest.) This has been one of my favorite Samhain reads since it first came out, and every year I come away from it deepened and enriched

Non-fiction:

Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005)

The British academic press that published this one was entirely taken aback when it became a runaway bestseller, as actual practicing witches snapped up the meager first run. Wilby is a historian who in this book focuses on familiars, which she defines broadly as spirit-helpers in either animal or human form who aided the early modern British witch in her magic. This she compares to accounts of shamans from various cultures and their experiences with their own spirit-helpers. Naturally, she finds a lot of commonality between the two. Hmm.

If the God of Witches is preeminently Master of Animals (to me this seems patently obvious), it makes complete sense that he should offer guidance to his witches through their relationships with animals. Here’s a how-to guide.

Stephen J. Yeates, The Tribe of Witches: The Religion of the Dobunni and Hwicce (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2008)

This one gets my award for “Best Title of the Year.” (Well, the first half, anyway.) Yeates is an archaeologist, and he believes that the West Midlands Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the Hwicce gave rise to the religion of the Wicce. This is impossible both linguistically and historically (since witchcraft did not become a religion until the 20^th century, to trace its origins to a tribal religion of a thousand years ago is simply not credible). Yeates has clearly taken modern Wicca as a point of departure and is reading backwards, doing his damnedest to find a Triple Goddess paired with a God of Hunting—and better it be if he’s horned. Also, he doesn’t write very well, and there’s page upon page of information about which English creek flows into which English river, which in turn—in case you wondered—is a sub-tributary of the Severn.

So why should you read this book? For this reason: because, like Garner and Moore, Yeates climbs down into the landscape itself in search of his Hwicce-craft. The work that he does for the Severn/Cotswolds region is the kind of work that all of us need to be doing for our own areas, and Yeates can show us how to go about it.

First read this book, and then go down to the nearest river. I promise you, you’ll see it with different eyes. Oh yeah: be sure to take an offering along.

David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004)

Quite simply the best study I’ve ever read of how the human brain works and how it generates religious experience. The witch being one who thinks Third Thoughts—i.e. who watches herself think and thinks about her own thinking—this book is an indispensable guide to the varying states of consciousness, regular and altered. (Maybe that should be “altared” consciousness.) In language that even a non-neuro-physiologist like myself can (if not without some effort) follow.

This in itself would be worth the price of admission, but wait: there’s more! Lewis-Williams applies the insights of brain physiology into reading the art of the Upper Palaeolithic caves of south-eastern Europe. (What, for instance, if the walls of the cave were thought of as semi-permeable membranes between This World and the Other?) This book will give you insights into how the ancestors may well have thought (and hence—third thoughts again—possible new directions in which to guide our own thinking) that, like most good ideas, will seem utterly obvious—once someone has gone to the work of articulating them. Another hard read that’s more than worth the work.

OK, those are my picks for the “Thinking Witch (or Hobman)’s Top Reads of the Year.” Next?

Good Samhain and Happy New Year,

Steve

Poet and storyteller Steven Posch, known as “the pagan rabbi” and the “Father of Paganistan,” is one of the Twin Cities’ preeminent Men-in-Black. He is keeper of the Minnesota Ooser.