Feast days you can keep on a Tuesday
Twelve dollars a month for the old year brought into the house: a keeping guide for each of its days as it comes round, the seasonal table with its recipes, herb and garden notes by the moon. For readers who would rather live the year than read about it.
On St Michael's Eve in the Hebrides, the eldest daughter of the house baked the struan, a cake made from every grain the croft had grown that year, oats and bere and rye ground in equal measure and wetted with ewes' milk saved for it. Alexander Carmichael, who spent decades among the islanders taking down their prayers, recorded the blessing she said softly over the meal as she worked it. The feast was set by the harvest, and the prayer was said with flour on her hands.
Hearth & Table brings the old year home to the kitchen you actually cook in. It follows the days the Gaelic and Norse households kept (the quarter days, the winter nights, Yule and the saints' days where the old north met the new faith) alongside the ones still kept across the Southeast, like Decoration Day in the mountain churchyards. Each one arrives with its dish for the table and one small keeping for the house, set down plainly enough to manage on a weeknight.
Keeping an old day inside a modern week takes somebody willing to try it with flour on their hands and no audience watching. That willingness is the whole thing and it cannot be bought, automated or faked, which is why this tier depends entirely on the people in it. Gratitude for bringing these days back into a real kitchen. What is owed in return is honest history, with the attested marked off plainly from the guessed, and then getting out of your way.
What's Included in Your Membership
A keeping guide for each of the old year's days as it comes round, telling who kept the day and how, with one thing to do with your own hands that evening.
Seasonal recipes with their history and lore told alongside, each one printable as a card for the kitchen.
A note at each turning of the season on dressing the nature table and clearing it again.
Garden and herb notes by the moon and the season.
Everything included in The Seed Drawer.