A Table for the Beloved Dead: Cooking with Hildegard of Bingen on All Souls Day

A Table for the Beloved Dead: Cooking with Hildegard of Bingen on All Souls Day | Fire Over Water

All Souls Day · Hildegard's Kitchen

A Table for the Beloved Dead: Cooking with Hildegard of Bingen on All Souls Day

Three recipes from Hildegard's Physica, and what the medieval visionary can teach us about honoring those we have loved and lost.

When the veil feels thin

As October turns to November, the light thins, the leaves fall, and many of us feel our ancestors drawing close. For more than a thousand years, November 2, All Souls Day, has been a night for remembering the dead: lighting candles, visiting graves, and cooking the foods that comfort grief.

Few people understood that border between the seen and unseen like Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179). A visionary, healer, composer and herbalist on the Rhine, she spent her life describing a living light that only she could see. She also wrote more about food as medicine for the spirit than almost anyone of her age.

This post brings those threads together: how Hildegard actually experienced the unseen, a haunting story of her loyalty to one young man's grave, and three recipes from her healing book, the Physica, to set a table of remembrance for the people you have loved and lost.

Seeing with the eyes of the soul

Hildegard's mysticism was not trance or séance. She never left her body, never spoke for spirits, and was careful to say so. What she described was stranger and more beautiful: a radiance that was with her, eyes open and wide awake, from early childhood until her death.

In a letter written in 1175, near the age of eighty, she tried to explain it. The light was not in any one place, and it was brighter than a cloud with the sun behind it. Within it, words, music and images appeared like stars reflected on water. She named it “the shadow of the Living Light.” Now and then a deeper light flashed inside it, and when it did, she wrote, every sorrow left her and she felt like a young girl again.

A few threads from her experience are worth carrying into your own All Souls rituals:

  • Everything is alive. Hildegard saw the cosmos as a vast, glowing egg, and all of creation as charged with viriditas, a “greening power” that keeps stones, rivers and bodies alive. Death, to her, was a turning of seasons, not an ending.
  • Wonder with discernment. She kept her visions secret for decades and wrote them down only in her forties. Even then she asked trusted teachers to test them. Her gift came with humility, not spectacle.
  • The body is a doorway. The same woman who saw the universe burning with light also explained how to cook spelt and when to eat fennel. For her, nourishing the body and opening the spirit were a single practice.

That last thread is our way into the kitchen. Hildegard believed food could darken or lighten the mind. Her favourite praise for a plant in the Physica is that it makes a person cheerful, clears the senses or opens the heart, which is exactly what a grieving heart needs.

The grave she would not open

Hildegard's most powerful encounter with the dead came in the last year of her life. In 1178 her community at Rupertsberg, above the Rhine at Bingen, buried a young man in their garden cemetery. He had once been cast out by the Church, but he had made his peace before he died, and the whole town walked behind his coffin.

Officials in nearby Mainz ordered the nuns to dig him up. Hildegard, now about eighty, refused. She wrote that she turned, as always, to the light, and understood that a soul received into peace must not be disturbed.

The cost was enormous. Her convent was silenced: for months the sisters were forbidden their music and their sacred rites, the heart of their days. Hildegard wrote letter after letter and made the journey to Mainz while ill. The ban was lifted in 1179, only months before her own death that September.

It is the perfect story for this season. Hildegard's bond with the dead was not about summoning anyone. It was about faithfulness: protecting a resting place, speaking up for someone who could no longer speak, and refusing to let a life be forgotten. Medieval communities honoured their dead in the same spirit, keeping books of their names, remembering them on their anniversaries, and in some houses giving a departed member's daily bread to the hungry in his memory.

Recipe 1: Soul Cakes of Joy

These small spiced cakes come straight from Hildegard's entry on nutmeg in the Physica (Book I, Plants, ch. 21). She tells the reader to grind nutmeg with an equal weight of cinnamon and a little clove, work it into fine flour and water, and eat the cakes often. They will, she says, “calm all bitterness of the heart and mind” and make the spirit cheerful.

In later centuries, English households baked “soul cakes” for All Souls and handed them to neighbours and travellers, who promised to remember the family's dead in return. Hildegard never made soul cakes by that name, but her joy cakes suit the custom beautifully: a gentle remedy for grief, made to be given away.

Soul Cakes of Joy

Makes: about 24 small cakes Prep: 20 min + 30 min chilling Bake: 10–12 min

Ingredients

  • 2 cups (250 g) whole spelt flour, plus more for rolling
  • 2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
  • 2 tsp ground cinnamon
  • ½ tsp ground cloves
  • Pinch of salt
  • ½ cup (115 g) unsalted butter, softened
  • ⅓ cup (110 g) mild honey
  • 1 egg yolk
  • 1–2 tbsp cold water, as needed

Method

  1. Whisk the flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and salt in a bowl.
  2. In a second bowl, beat the butter and honey until smooth, then beat in the egg yolk.
  3. Stir the dry ingredients into the butter mixture. Add water a spoonful at a time until the dough just holds together.
  4. Pat into a disc, wrap, and chill for 30 minutes. Honey doughs are soft and roll far more easily when cold.
  5. Heat the oven to 350°F (175°C) and line two baking sheets with parchment.
  6. Roll the dough ¼ inch (6 mm) thick on a floured surface and cut 2-inch (5 cm) rounds. With a knife, mark a cross on each, as soul cakes traditionally were.
  7. Bake 10–12 minutes, until the edges are just golden. Honey browns quickly, so watch the last few minutes.
  8. Cool on a rack. They keep a week in an airtight tin.

For the purist: Hildegard's own version is only flour, water and the three spices. Mix 2 cups (250 g) spelt flour with the spices above and about ½ cup (120 ml) water to a firm dough, roll thin, and bake at 375°F (190°C) for 12–15 minutes. The result is closer to a spiced cracker.

A note on nutmeg: Keep to the amounts here. Nutmeg is safe in culinary quantities but can be toxic in large doses. Traditional guidance suggests no more than three or four cakes a day for adults, fewer for children.

Recipe 2: Chestnut, Fennel and Spelt Vigil Soup

This is a soup for the evening of November 1, when families once sat up through the night keeping vigil for their dead. Every main ingredient carries one of Hildegard's “joy” notes:

  • Chestnut (Physica III, Trees, ch. 12): a tree she says symbolizes discretion. She advises eating the kernels for a person whose heart aches and grows sad, so that gladness returns to them.
  • Spelt (Physica I, ch. 5): her best grain, which she says makes a happy mind and puts joy in the human disposition.
  • Fennel: whatever way it is eaten, she writes, it makes the heart joyful.
  • Galangal: one of her most prized warming spices, here in a small amount.

Chestnut, Fennel and Spelt Vigil Soup

Serves: 6 Soak: spelt overnight Cook: about 1½ hours

Ingredients

  • 1 cup (190 g) whole spelt berries, soaked overnight in cold water
  • 2 tbsp butter
  • 1 leek, white and pale green parts, sliced and well rinsed
  • 1 small onion, chopped
  • 1 fennel bulb, trimmed and diced, fronds reserved
  • 2 cups (about 300 g) cooked, peeled chestnuts, roughly chopped (vacuum-packed or jarred are fine)
  • 6 cups (1.4 L) chicken or vegetable stock
  • 1 bay leaf
  • ¼ tsp ground galangal (or ½ tsp grated fresh galangal)
  • Salt and freshly ground black pepper
  • Optional: ¼ cup (60 ml) dry white wine; 1 egg yolk beaten with 2 tbsp cream, to finish

Method

  1. Drain the spelt, cover with fresh water by 2 inches (5 cm), and simmer 50–60 minutes until tender but chewy. Drain and set aside.
  2. Meanwhile, melt the butter in a large pot over medium-low heat. Cook the leek, onion and fennel gently for 10 minutes until soft but not browned.
  3. Add the wine, if using, and let it bubble for a minute.
  4. Add the chestnuts, stock, bay leaf and galangal. Simmer, partly covered, for 25 minutes.
  5. Remove the bay leaf. Blend about half the soup until smooth and return it to the pot, so the soup is creamy with some texture.
  6. Stir in the cooked spelt and heat through. Season well with salt and pepper.
  7. To finish the medieval way, take the pot off the heat, whisk a ladle of hot soup into the yolk and cream, then stir it back in. Do not let it boil again.
  8. Serve with chopped fennel fronds on top.

Why no squash or potato? Pumpkin soups feel autumnal, but squash and potatoes are New World plants unknown in Hildegard's Rhineland. Leeks, fennel and chestnuts give the same comfort and are true to her kitchen.

Recipe 3: Hearth-Roasted Chestnuts with Honey

The simplest dish here comes from the same chestnut entry. Hildegard advises drying the kernels gently over a fire and eating them warm to comfort the spleen, and steeping them in honey for an ailing liver. Combined, they make a sweet, smoky treat to pass around once the candles are lit for your beloved dead.

Hearth-Roasted Chestnuts with Honey

Serves: 4–6 Prep: 15 min Roast: 20–25 min

Ingredients

  • 1 lb (450 g) fresh sweet chestnuts in their shells
  • 3 tbsp mild honey
  • 1 tbsp butter
  • Pinch of ground cinnamon
  • Pinch of flaky salt

Method

  1. Heat the oven to 425°F (220°C).
  2. Lay each chestnut flat side down and cut a deep X through the shell with a sharp knife. Do not skip this: unscored chestnuts can burst in the oven.
  3. Soak the scored chestnuts in hot water for 10 minutes, then drain. The steam helps the shells release.
  4. Spread on a baking sheet, cut side up, and roast 20–25 minutes, until the shells curl back and the nuts are tender.
  5. Wrap them in a clean kitchen towel for 10 minutes, then peel while still warm, removing the papery inner skin too.
  6. Warm the honey and butter together in a small pan. Toss the peeled chestnuts in it, then sprinkle with cinnamon and salt.
  7. Serve warm, in a bowl in the middle of the table.

If you have a fireplace, a long-handled chestnut pan over glowing embers gives the truest Hildegard flavour. Shake it often for 15–20 minutes.

Setting a table of remembrance

To cook with the unseen world in Hildegard's spirit is to make the meal an act of love toward those who came before us. These simple rituals can be adapted to any tradition:

  1. Speak their names. Write the names of the people you have lost on a card or in a small book, just as medieval communities kept books of their dead. Read them aloud before you eat.
  2. Light a flame. Set a beeswax candle beside the names. For Hildegard, light was the clearest sign of the divine, and a flame is the oldest way to say you are not forgotten.
  3. Pause in silence. Before the first bite, take a minute of quiet. Let each person share one memory, or simply hold a face in mind. If your family prays, the ancient words are short and lovely: Eternal rest grant unto them, and let perpetual light shine upon them.
  4. Give the cakes away. Following the soul-cake custom, and the old practice of giving the departed's bread to the hungry, set aside some joy cakes for a neighbour, a friend who is grieving, or a local food pantry.
  5. Walk to the graves. Visit a cemetery in the first week of November, tidy a headstone, leave a flower. Bring warm roasted chestnuts in a paper cone for the walk.
  6. Keep an empty place. Many European families set one extra place at the table on this night. It is a quiet reminder that the family is larger than whoever is in the room.
None of this is about calling spirits back. It is about what Hildegard fought for at the end of her life: keeping faith with the dead, and letting their memory feed the living.

Sources

  • Hildegard of Bingen, Physica, trans. Priscilla Throop (Healing Arts Press, 1998): entries on spelt (I.5), nutmeg (I.21), fennel, galangal and the chestnut tree (III.12).
  • The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, vols. I and II, trans. Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman (Oxford University Press): letters to the prelates of Mainz and Archbishop Christian on the Rupertsberg interdict (1178–79); Letter 103r to Guibert of Gembloux on her visions (1175).
  • Hildegard of Bingen, Mystical Writings, ed. Fiona Bowie and Oliver Davies (Crossroad): Book of Divine Works prologue on seeing “fully awake” and not in ecstasy.
  • Jany Fournier-Rosset, From Saint Hildegard's Kitchen (Liguori, 2010): modern adaptations of the joy cakes and chestnut dishes.

Looking for more from Hildegard's kitchen? Explore our seasonal recipes and her teaching on spelt, the grain of joy, here on the Fire Over Water blog.

DietChristine PalmaDietComment