The video explores the unique and historical role of sin eaters, individuals tasked with consuming food believed to absorb the sins of deceased loved ones. This practice, rooted in folklore, involved offering cakes and funeral biscuits to sin eaters, a custom that evolved into elaborate funeral rituals involving gingerbread and other sweets across different cultures and eras.

The narrative delves into the intriguing history of kitchen traditions associated with mourning, such as the Victorian practice of sharing funeral biscuits wrapped in white paper. Highlighting recipes such as those from Eliza Acton's 1845 publication, the clip enriches the historical context by showcasing how these foods were culturally significant and a core part of rituals helping souls transition to the afterlife.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. antipathy [ænˈtɪpəθi] - (noun) - A strong feeling of dislike. - Synonyms: (aversion, hostility, enmity)

There is one prejudice that I have had to overcome since coming to America, which is my antipathy to sponge cake and ladyfingers.

2. enduring [ɪnˈdjʊərɪŋ] - (adjective) - Lasting over a long period; persistent. - Synonyms: (persistent, lasting, abiding)

This is not only the oldest board game in the world, but also the most enduring.

3. cahoots [kəˈhuːts] - (noun) - Collusion or collaboration usually for deceitful purposes. - Synonyms: (collusion, conspiracy, partnership)

These people were often also accused of being in cahoots with the devil or would dabble in witchcraft.

4. macabre [məˈkɑːbrə] - (adjective) - Disturbing and horrifying because of involvement with or depiction of death and injury. - Synonyms: (gruesome, grim, gory)

Now, while these cakes started out plain and unadorned, by the 19th century, it had become de rigueur to decorate them with symbols of death, whether that be a rose or cross or an hourglass or more macabre, a skull or a coffin.

5. evocative [ɪˈvɒkətɪv] - (adjective) - Bringing strong images, memories, or feelings to mind. - Synonyms: (suggestive, reminiscent, expressive)

While these traditions imply that the food or drink is for the actual deceased person to enjoy in wherever they ended up, corpse cake and funeral biscuits are more meant for the living.

6. scapegoat [ˈskeɪpˌɡoʊt] - (noun) - A person or thing carrying the blame for others. - Synonyms: (fall guy, patsy, victim)

This person was essentially the human form of the goat mentioned in Leviticus, the scapegoat, who had all the transgressions of Israel laid upon it by Aaron.

7. superstitious [ˌsuːpəˈstɪʃəs] - (adjective) - Having or showing a belief in superstitions. - Synonyms: (credulous, gullible, impressionable)

And like the sin saddled scapegoat, the sin eater would be sent off into the wilderness, abhorred by the superstitious villagers

8. scanty [ˈskænti] - (adjective) - Small or insufficient in quantity or amount. - Synonyms: (meager, sparse, inadequate)

Though when the author says that it was because of the life they had chosen, that's not really true, because usually the sin eaters were the most desperate and impoverished people in a community, and so, simply to make ends meet, they agreed to take on the sin, whatever the consequences might be in the afterlife in return for a miserable fee and a scanty meal

9. gravestone [ˈɡreɪvstoʊn] - (noun) - A stone that marks a grave. - Synonyms: (tombstone, headstone, memorial)

And it's pretty clear that his neighbors appreciated this because in 1906, when he died, he was buried at the local church with a respectable gravestone.

10. aberration [ˌæbəˈreɪʃən] - (noun) - A departure from what is normal, usual, or expected, typically one that is unwelcome. - Synonyms: (anomaly, deviation, divergence)

This health code violation is probably an attempt of later writers to explain this odd ritual of putting food on a dead person.

Sin Eaters & Funeral Biscuits

The mourners are each presented with a piece of rich cake wrapped in white paper and sealed, a ceremony which takes place before the lifting of the corpse when each visitor selects his packet and carries it home with him unopened. Throughout history, these funereal finger foods could be anything from a plain loaf of bread to a fancy yeasted cake, though by the 18th and 19th century they were mostly what we would consider biscuits or cookies. Most popular were gingerbread, shortbread with caraway seeds or ladyfingers, and they varied by region.

In 1893, a woman who had moved to the United States from England was quoted in a newspaper saying, there is one prejudice that I have had to overcome since coming to America, which is my antipathy to sponge cake and ladyfingers. As so often served over here with ice cream, my associations with them are of the gloomiest sort. Ladyfingers are served in all parts of England with light refreshments at funerals and usually go by the name of funeral biscuits.

So ladyfingers or shortbread will do the trick. But I have decided to go with gingerbread using a recipe from Eliza Acton's 1845 modern cookery for private families. Now, she actually has several gingerbread recipes, one being good common gingerbread. But since this is for our dearly departed loved ones, I figure we could spend, splurge and make richer gingerbread. Melt together three, four of a pound of treacle and half a pound of fresh butter. Pour these hot onto a pound of flour mixed with half a pound of sugar and three quarters of an ounce of ginger. When the paste is quite cold, roll it out with as much flour as will prevent its adhering to the board. Bake the cakes in a very gentle oven so these should make a fine fare for a victorian funeral.

But as it happens, earlier today I was actually researching for an upcoming video on food for a much older funeral, that of King Tut. See, that is the blessing and the curse of Wondrium's vast catalog of over 6000 hours of videos on almost any topic you can imagine, from food and history to science and travel, and they're taught by experts in their field. Anyway, while I was researching King Tut, a video came up entirely devoted to a board game called Senate. This is not only the oldest board game in the world, but also the most enduring, being played for the better part of 3000 years.

Things haven't really changed. But before we get there, let me encourage you to sign up for a free trial of wondrium@wondrium.com.

Now, before we talk about how this gingerbread could help you get past St. Peter, I think we need to make it. So for this recipe, what you'll need is one cup or 340 grams of treacle or molasses, two sticks or 225 grams of butter. Three and a half cups or 450 grams of flour, one heaping cup or 225 grams of sugar. Now, she uses brown sugar in other recipes, and in this one she does not specify. So I'm pretty sure that she does mean white sugar, which would allow the spice to really come through, and hence the richer gingerbread. Two heaping tablespoons or 21 grams of ginger. And in her other gingerbread recipes, she does include a bit of clove and a bit of mace.

So first, sift the flour into a bowl and then add the sugar and the ginger and other spices, and then whisk together. Then put the treacle in a saucepan and the butter and set it over a low heat until the butter is melted. Though don't let it boil. Also, give it a little stir every once in a while, just so nothing burns. Once melted, slowly pour it into the flour while mixing. Then stir it in until combined into a dough and keep working the dough until it is smooth and glossy. As it cools, it'll start to firm up.

So just wait a couple minutes and then you'll be able to turn it out and form it into a disc and then wrap it in either parchment or saran, wrap and pop it into the fridge until, as she says, the paste is quite cold. I'd say a couple hours at least, but preferably overnight. Once the dough is chilled, set it on a lightly floured surface and roll it fairly thin. Now, you can go anywhere from, like a quarter inch to a little over a half inch. The thicker it is, the softer it's going to be. Otherwise it's going to be quite crisp, which is fine. Then cut these into any shape you like.

Now, while these cakes started out plain and unadorned, by the 19th century, it had become de rigueur to decorate them with symbols of death, whether that be a rose or cross or an hourglass or more macabre, a skull or a coffin. Can you imagine going to a funeral today where they hand out skull shaped cake pops? It's actually what I want at my funeral. So, not to be outdone by the victorians, I've decided to cut mine into the shapes of coffins, and some will be embossed with a skull.

So here's the thing. And I kind of saw this coming when I looked at the recipe, but I wanted to try it out just to make sure. And it is indeed the case that these cookies, no matter if you freeze them, no matter what you do, they're going to spread a lot. And so any shape that you give it, it's going to pretty much lose its shape. But just like lace cookies, when they are still hot, you can actually recut them and they will hold their shape very well after that.

So we'll get to that. But for now, put them in whatever shape that you want and pop them in the freezer for about an hour, then put them in the oven at 325 degrees fahrenheit or 160 celsius for 15 minutes. Now, while those bake, go ahead and hit the like button if you are enjoying this video, and I can't imagine why you'd still be here if you're not. And follow me.

As we trace back the history of this rather bizarre baking tradition, one of the oldest human behaviors that we know about is the leaving of food and drink for our dead loved ones for them to enjoy in the afterlife. The ancient Egyptians would fill tombs with mummified meat, and the Romans would make offerings of entire feasts before eating the food themselves while seated around the actual sarcophagus. Even today, leaving food at the graves and shrines of the dead is observed in many cultures, and if nothing else, some still pour one out for the homies.

But while those traditions imply that the food or drink is for the actual deceased person to enjoy in wherever they ended up, corpse cake and funeral biscuits are more meant for the living. Now, where the tradition comes from is really unknown, but 19th century historians would often try to trace it back to the ancient druids of Britain, who the roman author Pliny the elder claimed would murder a man and eat his flesh to secure the highest blessings of health.

Spooky, but unlikely, because even if the druids did practice cannibalism, which very much up for debate, linking that to the funeral biscuit is definitely the product of an overactive victorian imagination. Rather, the practice may have, and I say may have, come from the idea that a baked good could absorb someone's essence after they die. Some suggest that in medieval Europe, bread dough was left on the chest of a corpse, the dough rising with some positive aspect of the person's personality, then the bread and the virtue could both be consumed by the family.

But again, this health code violation is probably an attempt of later writers to explain this odd ritual of putting food on a dead person. Now, another and much more well documented possible origin is that the food was not meant to absorb someone's virtue, but quite the opposite. It would absorb their sin. The first mention of sin eating that I could find came from 1686, when antiquarian John Aubrey wrote of a curious custom carried out in the borderlands between England and Wales known as the marches.

According to Aubrey, when someone would die, the body would be brought outside and a loaf of bread and a maser bowl full of beer would be set on their chest, or else beside them. It was believed that this meager meal would then absorb all of the unatoned sins that the person had, and then the family would hire poor people who were to take upon them all the sins of the party deceased.

Now, it's unclear exactly how prevalent this practice was. And was it a public affair where the town kind of got together to watch this person eating sins? Or was it more of a private affair? One account from around 1800 definitely points toward the latter. Kind of a spur of the moment, last minute. Ah, we need somebody to get rid of their sin before the body gets cold.

A traveller found himself lost in the welsh bogs after dark when he happened upon a cottage. But just as I came in hoping lodging, I heard sounds of wailing within. And soon a woman came out into the dead of night, late as it was, and cried a name to the top pitch of her wild voice. When I looked in, there lay a corpse of a man with a plate of salt, holding a bit of bread placed on its breast.

The woman was shouting to the sin eater to come and do his office, which implies that it wasnt just anyone, willy nilly, who was willing to do this on a given day, but it was someone whose dedicated task was to be the sin eater. This was some desperate being who, being past redemption, lost to all hope of salvation, did, for a slight reward or to gratify the relatives of the one lying dead, take on his own soul all the sins of the deceased by a formal act.

This person was essentially the human form of the goat mentioned in Leviticus, the scapegoat, who had all the transgressions of Israel laid upon it by Aaron. And like the sin saddled scapegoat, the sin eater would be sent off into the wilderness, abhorred by the superstitious villagers. As a thing uncleanhouse, the sin eater cut himself off from all social intercourse with his fellow creatures by reason of the life he had chosen.

He lived, as a rule, in a remote place by himself, and those who chanced to meet him avoided him as they would a leper. These people were often also accused of being in cahoots with the devil or would dabble in witchcraft. Only when a death took place did they seek him out, and when his purpose was accomplished, they burned the wooden bowl and platter from which he had eaten the food handed across or placed on the corpse for his consumption.

Though when the author says that it was because of the life they had chosen, that's not really true, because usually the sin eaters were the most desperate and impoverished people in a community, and so, simply to make ends meet, they agreed to take on the sin, whatever the consequences might be in the afterlife in return for a miserable fee and a scanty meal. That miserable fee was usually sixpence.

But this is not always the case. Not only might they not be poor, but they also might not be treated as an outcast, but rather a hero of sorts. This was the case for Richard Munslow, the last known sin eater in Britain. He was a well established farmer near the village of Ratlinghope in Shropshire, and in 1873, of his four children got sick and within one week they all died.

And the village did not blame Munslow, but they did blame unatoned sins that were in the community at large. And so Munslow, wanting nobody to have to go through what he had just gone through, agreed to become the sin eaterhouse for the village. He believed that he was sacrificing his own immortal soul for the good of his neighbors.

And it's pretty clear that his neighbors appreciated this because in 1906, when he died, he was buried at the local church with a respectable gravestone. Now, while it was this part of England and Wales where the practice flourished, it never really took off in the rest of England. Or rather, if it had, then it kind of had died out fairly early on.

But there were perhaps remnants, as John Aubrey said, in the 17th century, it seems a remainder of this custom in the county of Oxford, where at the burial of every corpse, one cake and one flagon of ale, just after the interment, were brought to the minister in the church porch.

Though this could also be related to the custom of Avril, or Arvel, in old Norse meaning heir, ale or succession Alejande. Originally, it was thought to be an entire feast, not to commemorate the dead, but to welcome the new heir. But as time went along, the feast started to get smaller and smaller. In the 14th century, there is a record of a feast being so large that they required many kegs of wine and ale and one and a half butts of cider.

That's around 200 gallons of cider. Definitely a big feast. And I just like saying butts of cider. Now, by the 17th century, the arvel had really dwindled down to cold, posset stewed prunes, cake and cheese. And in 1673, an arel was declared rather shabby with nothing but a bit of cheese, a draught of wine, a piece of rosemary and a pair of gloves.

Why the gloves? Well, by this time, instead of a feast to welcome a new heir, it had become a small meal to give to pallbearers to enjoy just before the lifting of the coffin. And by the 19th century, avril or Arvel, either one works, had become just a little bit of cake and ale to be enjoyed as people sat around the coffin.

And I find this to be the most likely ancestor of funeral biscuits. When it split off, I don't really know. But in 1789, the gentleman's magazine ran an article that said, I observed on a window the following advertisement. Funeral biscuits sold here. And it is, it seems, the custom at the funerals of the middling and lower class of people to provide a kind of sugared biscuit, which are wrapped up, generally, two of them together in a sheet of white paper sealed with black wax, and thus presented to each person attending the funeral.

So it's kind of like when you would go to a birthday party as a kid, and the mom would hand everybody that little plastic bag of goodies as they walked out. You get the mini troll doll, some pop rocks, and if you were lucky, a slap bracelet. Though eventually it shifted from something that you received at the funeral to something that was received during the invitation to the funeral.

Essentially, someone would drop off the biscuits and it would be wrapped with the paper, and the paper would have the invitation with all of the pertinent information to attend the service. They also started printing bible verses and other little poems about death on the paper. And some of them were really quite macabre.

When ghastly death with unrelenting hand cuts down a father, brother or a friend, the still small voice should make you understand how frail you are, how near your final end. But if regardless and still warn'd in vain, no wonder if you sink to endless pain, be wise ere tis too late. Use well ichar to make your calling and election sure funeral biscuits by Bramley confectioner, tea dealer and milliner love that little advertisement that they just stuck there at the bottom of the funeral invite.

But I don't think it holds a candle to the ad for Peter Robinson's family. Mourning warehouse Regent street offers advantages to the nobility and families of the highest rank. Also to those of limited means. Morning warehouses were just that, not little shops, but department stores where you could fulfill all of your funeral needs. And these Home Depot like mortuaries were necessary in victorian London because funerals were a big, big deal.

Often they could cost up to $60,000 in today's money. And there was a point where one quarter of all of the savings in british banks was earmarked for people's funerals. And while I'm sure that coffin makers and hearse drivers were cashing in, the fact that bakeries were posting ads saying bride cakes and funeral biscuits made on the shortest notice makes me wonder if the entire industry was not devised as a way to sell more funeral biscuits like the ones I'm about to eat.

So once your biscuits are baked, take them out and put them onto a cooling rack, and now is the time to give them whatever shape you want. Basically, in the first 45 seconds or a minute after coming out of the oven, if you re put a cookie cutter or a stamp on there, it will maintain that shape. So do that now and then put them onto a wire rack to cool completely.

And here we are, funeral biscuits from Victorian England. So if you rolled it out thin, it's going to snap like that. Delicious. But if you rolled it out thicker and not a lot thicker, but it will bend like that, so it's going to be a little bit chewier. I'm going to gonna give one of those a shot after I drop it on the floor.

I'm not gonna eat the piece that fell on the floor, though. Mmm. So much ginger, but it's not sweet. And it is more bread like than cookie or biscuit like. And she calls it gingerbread. And it really is more like ginger. Gingerbread. Even the crisp one. I feel like more like a ginger cracker or something.

But the key word is not the bread, it is the ginger. These are packed with ginger flavor more than any gingerbread I would have today. It's just like walloping you with ginger, but in a very good way because they are still quite sweet. But then there's also a little hint of bitterness from the molasses or the treacle. There is that bitterness really, really nice.

And flavor wise. I actually wish that more modern gingerbread was this spice forward now, as these were meant, in part, to help your soul along into the afterlife, I think it's important to have something else to bake, in case you've already been dead for a while and require other people to pray for your immortal soul. Luckily, there is a baked bribe that is intended to do just that. And those are soul cakes. So if you want to learn about soul cakes and the history of trick or treating, then watch this video right here, and I will see you next time on tasting history.

Science, History, Culture, Sin Eaters, Victorian Era, Funeral Traditions, Tasting History With Max Miller