The Frewyn Herald: Home of the Haanta Series

While we're preparing for the debut of the Frewyn Music Project, there is another collaboration with the talented Noah Tolhurst (Stillbuster, 2018) on the horizon: the Great Montreal Songbook, an opus cataloguing the history of Montreal through song. So you won't cry about having to wait too long, here is one of the songs from the album about the famous stone that was erected to commemorate the thousands of Irish immigrants who died from typhus: The Walk of the Stone - An Charraig Dubh by Michelle Franklin March, 1848 A bishop and servant under God’s aegis I write to you now of the horrors I witnessed The burgeoning of the tide that brought six thousand Men, women, and children from the island abroad. They arrived on the banks of the St. Laurence In dismal droves, they quitted the ships, With hunger in their mouths and hope in their hearts. Though the famine wracked their fail frames, a greater threat plagues the ships that brought them. May God support you un...

  Labourers are rarely ever repaid their daily trials, and a miner’s sufferance is never one to want to emulate, but once, in the small mining town of Galae, situated in an old river valley, nestled between the fields and furrows, where ploughs of plenty had carved out the landscape, lived a miner and his wife, a young couple of meager means and little fortune, whose affection had held up the foundations of their house, and whose high spirits and easy manners recommended them to everything that was good and right in the world. They lived in a small way near a mining camp, and contracted as their income was when the veins and estuaries ran dry, they were happy people, blessed in their neighbours, pleased with their garden yield, and never wanting for anything beyond what joys a child might bring. Their having children, though a spiriting notion, would have to wait: the wife was taking in the summer harvest in the neighbouring fields, and the husband was away on a dig, each doing...

Frewyn is known for its bakery goods. It is a kingdom built on butter, so writes Baronous Hodge, an immigrant to Frewyn who came from Marridon and eventually ended up living there, largely due to the peace in their agrarian society, but in some small part to the food: "It is the fault of their cookery that I dread going back to Marridon." From Martje's Royal Cookery Book, here is an extract and one of Baronous' favourite recipes:  Baronous Hodge, on how Frewyns manage their kitchens :   Frewyns never seem to measure things. They have their own system of measurements, which is linked closely with Marridon’s arrangement, but they never seem at liberty to use it. It is a foreigner who needs a recipe; no cook in Frewyn has ever written anything down except to catalogue it for posterity, and even then a cook may glance over it and never look at the ingredients twice.  Cooking is an art, baking is a science, but Frewyn cookery is seemingly some kind of amalgamation of...