Читать книгу The Taste of Britain - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall - Страница 132

A Cornish fairing is a ginger biscuit of a type long associated with fairs in the South West. Some speculate that the name fairing means a ring-shaped biscuit sold at a fair, but most authorities agree that it actually means objects (not necessarily edible) which could be bought at fairs and were popular as gifts. As we come home with a goldfish in a bowl and candy-floss, so our forebears returned with a little packet of goodies. Florence White (1932) quotes information from Cornwall that ‘a proper and complete fairing’ included gingerbread biscuits, lamb’s tails (caraway dragées), candied angelica, almond comfits and macaroons. Early in the nineteenth century, the poet Keats mentioned the ‘gingerbread wives’ of Barnstaple (Devon). Recipes for Barnstaple Fair gingerbread are still to be found, even if the sweetmeat itself is no longer available. Almost every fair and festivity in Britain probably had some edible keepsake: in Nottingham it was the cock-on-a-stick, in Bath the gingerbread Valentines, and so on. In more cases than not, the memento was spiced bread, cake or biscuit-the consequence of the medieval love affair with spices. Just the same process can be seen across the water in continental Europe.

The history of the specific biscuits now called Cornish fairing is largely unrecorded. All that is known is that they have been made for many years by a baker’s firm called Furniss, which was founded in 1886 in Truro.