Good Friday

Good Friday is a solemn and sacred day in the life of the Christian Church, and when it comes to food, this has consequences for Catholics in particular.

That isn't to say that the Christians don't take today seriously. They do. A friend was mine, now sadly deceased, was an Episcopalian. The kind who sincerely believed he was both an Episcopalian and a Catholic, He would eat nothing until after he had been to church in the afternoon for the Good Friday service and then, at about 5pm, he would have some buttered toast. Of course, committed Eastern Orthodox would have been horrified at the idea of the butter dripping all over hot toast. What an indulgence!

In the West we take a more flexible approach.

I've never tried vegan Lent. This year I went vegetarian and that was penance enough.

By tradition, and by law, Good Friday, like Ash Wednesday, is a day of both fasting for abstinence.

So no meat.

But the fasting is somewhat lenient. The rule is that you may only have one meal and two smaller meals which do not equal the one main meal. 

How we apply this is left to our conscience. 

Apparently Cardinal Wiseman used to have a lobster on Good Friday.

But he never looked like a man who would risk wasting away through excessive fasting.

I wouldn't choose to have lobster myself but neither could I condemn a man (or woman) for choosing to do say. The penance is in abstinence from meat, and from denying ourselves what we would normally eat.

It doesn't mean dining on dust and ashes.

There are plenty of delicious things which are meat-free.

There's nothing more English than fish and chips and a (small!) portion would be well within the spirit and letter of the law concerning Good Friday.