Tasty Words

Although not the most accomplished cook, Ms Bell can hardly be called a teacher who doesn’t try to cater for all areas of her students’ learning experiences. Whilst waltzing through the various portraits of pilgrims in Chaucer’s General Prologue, Year 11 Advanced English encountered a Franklin whose favourite food was ‘cake sopped in wyn’. The ingredients may have been obscure (I thought ‘mace’ was something you hit people with?!) and sometimes impossible to find, a version of ‘cake sopped in wyn’ was presented to the class, albeit with the wine substituted by grape juice. A highly spiced concoction, this dish was savoured by most students and resisted by a few (no sense of adventure). All were left with the appreciation that medieval food was not just great haunches of roast meat on bread trenchers, but was an art in itself. Part of understanding what Geoffrey Chaucer was writing about is ‘getting into the skin’ of his 14th Century audience, who by all means were a very cultured lot.

Year 10 have been studying the novel To Kill a Mockingbird and have been appreciating the character of Calpurnia in the Finch household. The story is set in 1930s America and surrounds the trial of an African-American man and the feelings it stirs up in the local population. Scout and Jem Finch are motherless and being raised by their father, Atticus, and their African-American housemaid, Calpurnia. In a very moving scene just read by the students, Atticus tells an unpopular aunt that Calpurnia is one of the family, that he couldn’t have raised the children without her and, also, that the children love her. One of the delicacies that Calpurnia makes for the children is cornbread. With a view to gaining a deeper appreciation for a special character, Ms Bell’s class enjoyed a pan of Southern cornbread.