The Brits Cross Their Buns A Little Differently...

The year is 1800. A wind wails on a cold night in Bow, a community in the East End of London. Rain is pelting down. Inside a small, working-class home a widow waits. She paces back and forth in front of her small fire in fretful agony. The house has been quiet for many years. Her hands are tough and calloused, exposed to hour after grueling hour of scullery work. At this moment, though, work is far from her mind. While the wind hisses outside the only thing she thinks of is her son, her Navy-recruit son, who is due home at any moment. The fire crackles a bit. She looks out the window. Nothing. The son does not arrive home. Our widow does not give up hope. Later that night she ties a hot-crossed bun to the ceiling of her small home to mark the passing of the day. The year goes by and the son never materializes. The next year the widow raises another bun to the ceiling. She proceeds to do this every Easter, and for each successive Easter, a new hot-crossed bun she raises.

A fire took the house years later. A pub now stands where the house used to be. This being England, a country which adores a good tradition - especially if drink can be part of it - the hot-crossed bun ceremony continues every Good Friday. The pub is named the Widow's Son out of respect for this 200-year-old practice. As the sign states: "A widow who lived in a house on this site baked a hot-crossed bun every Easter for her sailor son, who sadly never returned home. The buns piled up and the custom still goes on." I went to the Widow's Son on Good Friday and saw the year 2000's bun raised to the rafters of the pub.

Bow is just off the highway. Getting out of the Underground and surfacing, my view of the Thames is overwhelmed by the Millennium Dome. Garbage is strewn everywhere and the cloud cover is low. I begin to walk and quickly become lost in a Council Estate, England's version of a housing project. A guy comes up to me and asks if I am looking for "the pub."

The Widow's Son is sandwiched between two large manufacturing buildings. Music pours out and everyone looks like they have been drinking for quite a while already. The pub, a cramped room with wood floors, looks hardly distinguishable from any of the other pubs I have dropped in on while in London.

Suddenly I see them, dangling from a hook over the bar. This makes all the difference. There are significantly fewer than I had imagined, yet the cluster that does swing gently over the bar gives a good enough indication of what the others may have looked like. Blackened and moldy, the buns are clustered together and look like grapes with elephantiasis. All have years baked into their tops with dough: 1956, 1973,1989.

The crowd is glassy-eyed and tattoos abound. Talk is colloquial and full of loud laughing and chortling. A spread has been laid on a bridge table in honor of the bun: sausages, butter sandwiches, chicken basted in canola oil. Sitting grandly in the middle of the food table presiding over the above mentioned delicacies is a basket full of pre-buttered buns.

Navy cadets are at the pub. These new recruits are current members of the same corps the widow's son had been a member of 200 years ago. They have the responsibility of raising the bun.

Aside from the Navy cadets and the news crew that has trekked over, the other guests of honor are the Pearly King and Queen. The Pearlies are a completely English invention. Each Borough within the City of London chooses a King and Queen as honorary mayors. Their name derives from the suits they wear, which are conventional black suits completely covered from head to toe in pearl buttons. Everything is pearl: their hats, their trousers and skirt, their blazers. This set even had "Borough of Stepnal Pearly King and Queen" sewn in buttons on the back of their blazers.

We mill about drinking, and with no notice the bun appears. Gingerly it is carried to the cadets who hoist one of their own up to the rafters. After a few moments of fumbling, the year 2000 bun joins the rest of the cluster.

"Let's have a cheer for the first bun of the millennium!" the King sputters. We in the crowd throw a huzzah into the air.

"Let's hear it again for the bun!" The King again sputters; another cheer.

Then curiously, everyone becomes rather still for a split second, as if we collectively are remembering the reason why we are all standing in a pub in Bow, drinking lager and cheering for a bun. The social classes had come together on this Saturday before Easter, in a poor borough of London, to continue a humble 200-year-old custom. I have not felt such a sense of community in a great while. Especially for a starch-based product. As they say in Fiddler on the Roof, "Tradition!" I wonder if Passover matzah can be hung from a ceiling?