Virtual Refectory: Easter abstinence and male exhibitionists

Hot buns and bare bums!

Scrolling through Instagram (as one often does when one should be working), I came across a post by Costa Coffee advertising their new hot-cross bun cappuccino and hot chocolate, as well as a chocolate and orange mini-egg cake. I'm not telling you this to make you yearn for sugary delights (although, I must admit, my mouth is watering as I type this), but because my attention was initially captured by this post as I realised that religiously-specific foods—and made out of the majority of ingredients abstained from during Lent—were now very much a part of the secular mainstream. I mentioned this in last week's podcast largely because I suppose it shocked me somewhat that a bread product first adorned with a cross by a monk in the twelfth century (or so we believe) has now found its way onto the menu of a national chain of coffee shops. I bet Elizabeth I isn’t too pleased, either. She banned the consumption of hot-cross buns in 1592 on any day besides Good Friday, Christmas, or burials (too popish, of course)!

This got me thinking about how plainly religious items are in use right under our noses every single day…and many of us don’t even realise!

Maybe I need to sample them…for research purposes, of course.

That’s enough of the Easter food talk for now (I’m appearing on a podcast to talk all about this topic today so such delicacies are on my mind). But, speaking of hot buns…let’s turn to our first Virtual Refectory discussion post: male exhibitionist carvings and Sean-na-gigs! No, I haven’t lost my mind…yet.