The presence of absence
and a recipe for traditional Welsh cakes to sip with your cuppa today
Do you know the Welsh word hiraeth?
Famously untranslatable, it’s a lovely melancholy sort of word. The type of word that, on the surface, has one meaning but in reality is nuanced, layered, personal. An onion of a word.
Look up hiraeth and you might read that it is a deep longing for something, especially one's home. Dig deeper, and you will find the strata that lie within.
“hiraeth (n): a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home that maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for lost places in your past.”
I first heard of hiraeth from American author Pamela Petro. In a recent interview with Mary Hynes on CBC, Petro described how she came to Wales as a young woman and immediately connected to the landscape. As she described it, it was the sudden awareness that you belong to a place that you’ve never been before.
A place allows you to come into yourself.
Flourishing in the space between
As I listened to Petro, I thought that all of us might have been experiencing a bit of hiraeth in these past two years. The longing for a time past; the desire to return to a figurative place in our lives where we flourished and were our best selves; a yearning for a happiness that feels as if it’s past.
Perhaps in a sweetly sorrowful way, hiraeth reminds us of a version of ourselves that we’re having trouble connecting with again; a sense of incompleteness that makes us feel unfulfilled in the present.
And yet there is a hopefulness too.
Between the place where one lives and the place where one flourishes best is a space that might also be called hiraeth. As Petro describes it, it’s both an uncomfortable and creative spot that creates a “presence of absence.” In that gap lies an opportunity for fresh thoughts and more deeply, a fulfillment of self. It’s a powerful driving force towards knowledge, invention, imagination.
Hiraeth has a Portuguese cousin: saudade. As Celinne Da Costa wrote, it’s a delicious cocktail of sadness and love, a tonic for a heart that longs to feel what it means to be human. And like hiraeth, it allows us to explore the things that we long for and understand the things that make us human.
Connecting with our melancholy to find joy
It has been hard to put words to all the feels. All the disappointments, regrets, missed moments. All the selves that we might have been, or long to be. But while hiraeth has a darkness, it also allows us to understand better what makes us whole, what feeds our spirits, what allows us to be our better selves.
In that place of longing lies joy, connection, meaning, creativity. Petro‘s writing encourages us to allow our sense of hiraeth to be a springboard. For it is only in that deep understanding of where we have been that we can get to ourselves again.
Welsh Cakes
from The Spruce Eats
makes 20 small cakes
I admit the only “Welsh” dish I’ve been familiar with is Welsh Rabbit, a delightful mashup of cheese on toast. But it turns out that dish may not be genuinely from Wales. So I dug in a bit to find something that might be more of its place, and came across these delightful tea cakes. Part scone, more pancake, these little bites are studded with currants and spiced with a mixture of cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg and other warming spices that give them a lovely note of flavour. Note that if you do not want to make the mixed spices (recipe linked below) you can substitute pumpkin pie spices.
Welsh cakes are traditionally cooked on a bakestone called a maen. A heavy frying pan works well at home, but take care not to let the sugar in your Welsh cakes burn. Mine were this side of too dark but delicious nonetheless.
Ingredients
2 ounces butter
2 ounces lard
8 ounces self-rising flour
3 ounces superfine sugar
3 ounces currants
1 generous teaspoon mixed spices (see headnote)
1 teaspoon honey
1 medium egg, beaten
Put the flour in a medium bowl, add the lard and the butter and rub the fats into the flour until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
Stir in the sugar, currants, mixed spice and honey.
Add the beaten egg and mix to form a firm dough.
On a floured board, roll or pat the mixture until about 2cm thick. Cut into 6 centimeters in diameter discs (2.3 inches) and griddle over medium heat until golden brown on both sides.
Dust the Welsh cakes with icing sugar and eat immediately or store in an airtight tin.