Manx Gaelic teacher, musician and composer Annie Kissack is the fifth to hold the title of Manx Bard. Each month she shares one of her poems with us, and explains what led her to write it.
Only in the Isle of Man would you find such an event as the World Bonnag Championship. Held in Dalby in February, it is one of the most popular events of the culinary year, as skillful bakers fight it out to make the world’s best bonnag.
In case you didn’t know, this year’s champion is Dan Sayle, who also does a bit of motor cycle racing on the side, apparently!
Bonnag is the distinctive bread-like loaf of the island, neither too sour or sweet, and is a fairly recent descendant of the traditional Manx flat cake, called the ’soddag’.
What makes a good bonnag? This is debatable!
I used to think bonnag was definitely a savoury affair and that the version with currants was a modern invention.
However I have since learned that there are as many recipes as, well, sliced bonnag, and I certainly wouldn’t like to be a judge.
In 1908, that great Manx woman, Sophia Morrison, and her sister Louisa, edited a Manx Cookery Book as a fund raiser for the rebuilding of Peel Church spire.
The barley-meal bonnag recipe included seems to have been a fairly plain affair.
As now, buttermilk is an essential ingredient but recipes would no doubt change as they were passed down the generations, with ingredients varying according to taste and availability of ingredients.
Perhaps next year someone might like to run a competition for the best Dalby Sandwich, which is also a recipe taken from the aforementioned cookery book?
It involves buttery barley cake, bruised potatoes and a coating of salt herring ’free from bones’.
Any takers?
Co-editing a cookery book was only a small part of Sophia Morrison’s contributions to preserving knowledge of traditional Manx ways of life.
As well as collecting folklore, she was also very active in the preservation of the Manx dialect.
This leads me to this month’s poem, more of a rhyme or a tongue twister, with a tasty topical subject and a hint of the vigorous dialect I love, although I’ve taken liberties and added some modern idioms.
Not much in English, Manx or Manx English could be found to rhyme with ’sultanas’.
I’m unsure how familiar Sophia would have been with bananas either, come to think of it, but language should not be a straightjacket.
