It’s a year since I launched Stir the Cauldron. My plan for the first year was to publish recipes and musings that reflected the changing seasons.
I chose to mark the seasons at the times of pagan festivals. This gave me eight points in the year to inspire recipes rather than just four seasons. It also got round the disagreements about when seasons start and end – for some the Summer Solstice is mid-Summer. For others the Solstice is the start of Summer. You can never please everyone.
Samhain
We’ve arrived at Samhain (pronounced Sow-in). It’s an appropriate time to complete the cycle.
Samhain is best known for Halloween celebrations; pumpkins, fancy dress and sugary confections. Halloween is popularly a time for ghost stories and scary movies. It has been reported that US residents spend more money on Halloween celebrations than they spend at Christmas.
They say that “the veil between this world and the spirit world grows thin” at Samhain. It might be more accurate to say that path between this world and the spirit world gets most use at this time of year. Samhain is a time of death.
Samhain is the last of three harvest festivals during the year. When people farmed at subsistence levels, they slaughtered the animals that they would not be able to feed during the winter, keeping only the pregnant females. Meat was salted, smoked or dried to preserve it for the winter. Once this gruesome chore was complete, as the days became shorter and colder, there was time to remember relatives and friends who had died in the past year and in the years before.
Celebrating with Bonfires
I associate this time of year with the smell of smoke. Gardeners tidy up their gardens after the summer, and farmers trim their hedges. Prunings and trimmings are burnt on bonfires. The evenings become darker and colder, and the smell of woodsmoke starts to drift from chimneys. As a child I remember fields of burning stubble after the grain harvests (and helping the fire to jump from one row to the next, whether the famer wanted it helped or not).
When it came to constructing a fragrance that would celebrate Samhain, I looked for ways of incorporating smoke. I don’t know of many really smoky commercial perfumes, but Tea for Two by L’Artisan Perfumeur is possibly my favourite of all perfumes. It captures the smell of China tea – Lapsang Suchong that I’ve always called “Smoky Bacon Tea”. Tea for Two is rather more subtle than the smell of a bacon sandwich, not that I have anything against bacon sandwiches.
At first I couldn’t find a natural fragrance that was evocative of woodsmoke. I considered a heavily peated malt whisky such as Octomore by Bruichladdich. Whisky turned out to be less than ideal as an ingredient for a fragrance, but only a few drops were sacrificed to the experiment. The remainder of the bottle enhanced evenings of conversation.
Capturing the smoke
I eventually found two smoky essential oils:
Choya Nakh is produced in India. It is made by “the destructive distillation of sea-shells” in an earthenware vessel called a choya.
Birch Tar Essential Oil is produced by heating birch bark in a closed metal container. The process is similar to that used to make charcoal. A dark and sticky tar condenses on the inside of the container. The tar can be cleaned and purified by steam distillation to produce a viscous essential oil. It’s difficult to handle because it’s so sticky. It’s also corrosive and will eat into the surface of plastics. However, the rich, smoky smell more than compensates for the struggle to incorporate it into a blend.
My blend of oils to capture the scent of of the season is Samhain.
