Spoon carving. Axe-making. Fig biscuits. Fig trees. Stuff about Sheffield.

September has arrived rather muggily. When I went out running earlier this morning it was warm and humid. For the last week or so I’ve been running in a hoody as it’s been very cool first thing in the morning. Today I felt decidedly overdressed. So it goes. Later I walked to the post office to post a birthday card - I could have taken it first thing but it would probably have got bent in the process - and the fine drizzle that was falling as I set off turned into proper rain, the slow and steady kind! There may be a chance of thunderstorms later! 

Skimming the newspapers Online I found several items about Sheffield, once the steel and knives town of the country - Sheffield knives and Toledo knives were the knives to have. When I visited Toledo years ago with a group of college students, we were impressed by the displays of knives in the shops there. Toledo, by the way, is well worth visiting, and not just for its knives. 

The first item was about a father and daughter partnership making axes, reviving an old Sheffield tradition. The father, Robin Wood, said, “A hundred years ago, every one of our grandparents, the shed at the bottom of the garden would have had an axe in it.” (In fact I think we still have one, from the time when we had a coal burning stove and an open fire.) The daughter, JoJo, added: “I think everybody should have an axe, just because they’re cool.”

The axes they make are very much craft-orientated, specifically for spoon carvers. Robin said of the axes they make, “It’s just a tool that you need for shaping wood with.” He teaches spoon carving and, finding that it was difficult to find good quality tools, he decided to produce his own. They are not cheap, £185 apiece! Not quite B&Q then! 

Jojo also teaches spoon carving, having worked hard at improving her own skills to a sufficient level. She got involved in Spoonfest – the Peak District festival that celebrates the craft and draws visitors from around the world – at the age of 18 and was annoyed by the macho aspect of the craft. “I kind of got into it out of feminist rage,” she said. Although spoon carving attracts a much more diverse audience than other types of woodworking, she said, “at that time the only people doing it professionally, or teaching, were all blokes. So I stubbornly decided that by the following year I was going to be good enough to teach. So I went away and spent a year carving spoons, and the next year I was teaching.”

As a matter of fact, spoon carving has traditionally been a masculine pursuit. “Originally made by young men during the long winter nights or by young men on long sea voyages, they were carved to express that young man’s intentions towards a particular girl. A love spoon would be given to a girl as an indication that he wished to court her. A girl may have received lovespoons from several suitors and these would be displayed on the wall of her home.”

The custom fell out of fashion but giving decorative wooden spoons has been revived in recent years - everyone likes a bit of nostalgic sentimentality, it seems - and now they are also produced commercially for people to commemorate special events in their lives. 

To carve spoons well, apparently, you need two basic blades – a straight one and a curved one for the bowl. And experts say that  blades may need a small amount of sharpening- known as ‘fettling’ while making the spoon.

That’s a good old word: “fettling”. To fettle is the maintain something in good order. And so a person can be “in fine fettle”. 

That’s enough of that. 

The other Sheffield-related item concerned fig trees. It seems that there are some fine examples of wild Mediterranean fig trees growing alongside the River Don which have been given protected species status. 

According the article I read, fig biscuits were a favourite local delicacy. I should like to take issue with that: fig biscuits were a Christmas-time delicacy for many in the Northwest of England. I can’t speak for other parts of the country, but I remember fig biscuits from my childhood, from long before ai ever saw a fig. Indeed it was only when ai cut into a real live fig that I realised how much fig actually went into those biscuits. Anyway, this is what I read: 

 

“In the days of heavy industry, fig biscuits were a favourite local delicacy. After they were eaten, the fig seeds passed through people’s digestive systems and ended up discharged as sewage into streams and rivers. When Sheffield was the centre of a great steel-making industry on the banks of the Don, the factories used its water to cool the hot metal and then dumped the waste warm water back into the river.

For the fig seeds, this would have seemed like being back in the Mediterranean, and they germinated and thrived in the warm waters. The trees grew into quite large specimens bearing fruit, and some of those trees are now thought to be over 70 years old.

And so the wild fig trees of Sheffield became an emblem of the city’s industrial heritage, and after a campaign by local people including botanists and ecologists at the University of Sheffield, the figs were given protected species status, making them the only protected alien plant species in Britain.”

So there it is, a bit of culinary, tree-related history. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!