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Sunday 05 February 2006
Fig Sunday: Sunday's food quotation
Palm Sunday, known locally as Fig Sunday, was a minor hamlet festival. ... The children ... loved the old custom of eating figs on Palm Sunday. The week before, the innkeeper's wife would get in a stock to be sold in pennyworths in her small grocery store. Some of the more expert cooks among the women would use these to make fig puddings for dinner and the children bought pennyworths and ate them out of screws of blue sugar paper on their way to Sunday school. ... The original significance of eating figs on that day had long been forgotten; but it was regarded as an important duty, and children ordinarily selfish would give one of their figs, or at least a bite out of one, to the few unfortunates who had been given no penny.
Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (Penguin modern classics, 1975, p. 231)