Monday, June 30, 2008

Corned Beef for the Feast of the Most Precious Blood

It would have seemed somehow in bad taste to eat black pudding tonight or on tomorrow's feast of the Precious Blood...

Instead, while at the 24 hour supermarket on the way home, I bought some nice corned beef. It's simmering gently in a pot with four or five carrots and onions, bayleaves and peppercorns, and four Crown lagers poured over the meat and veg. - that's the way to cook corned beef!

And as for the feast itself (whose 1st Vespers I'll soon be saying), it reminds me forcefully of the little chapter read on ferias during the year at None, taken from I St Peter i, 17a-19:

In timore incolatus vestri tempore conversamini: scientes quod non corruptibilibus auro vel argento redempti estis, sed pretioso sanguine quasi Agni immaculati Christi. R/. Deo gratias.

(Conduct yourselves with fear in the time of your sojourning: knowing that ye were not redeemed with perishable things, with silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without spot or blemish. R/. Thanks be to God.)


After all, we call Christ's Blood Most Precious, because It is indeed both beyond all price, and also is the very high cost of our salvation, won by the shedding of that Sacred Gore.

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