Kristin Janz

Category: Ancient Rome

  • “The Vanished Legions” in Tales of Ruma

    My latest story is out now in the Tales of Ruma anthology, available in both Kindle and paperback versions.

    “The Vanished Legions” explores the popular trope of Ancient Roman legions being spirited away to various fantasy worlds, but from the viewpoint of the Roman authorities in this world trying to figure out where all those missing soldiers have gotten to.

    It’s not the most serious story I’ve ever written.

    Tales of Ruma ties into Ruma: Dawn of Empire, a tabletop roleplaying game from the same company (Azure Keep). The game is “set in an alternate Roman Empire where myth and magic are real.” Stories for the anthology could be set in the game world, or in Ancient Rome or Greece. If you’re into RPGs, and Ancient Rome, you might want to check out the game as well!

  • Kickstarter for Tales of Ruma anthology

    Do you love stories about Ancient Rome? If so, you might want to check out this Kickstarter for the Tales of Ruma anthology, coming out in April.

    Described as “an anthology of short stories inspired by Greek and Roman mythology”, Tales of Ruma includes fiction by Jody Lynn Nye, David Farland, and Julie Frost–and my own story “The Vanished Legions”.

    You can get the ebook for a $5 pledge, the paperback for $15, or a special limited edition hardcover for $50.

    I love the cover art, and I’m really excited to read all the other stories!

    They also have a tabletop roleplaying game called Ruma: Dawn of Empire. This is “set in an alternate Roman Empire where myth and magic are real”. In fact, the anthology is really a tie-in for the game, with some of the stories set in the game world. (Although mine is about actual historical Romans. Mostly.)

    Anyway, take a look!

  • At World Fantasy Convention this weekend

    Donald and I will be at the World Fantasy Convention in San Antonio this weekend. We’re sharing a table in the dealers’ room with some author friends, so if you’re attending, be sure to stop by and say hello! (And pick up a copy of Mysterion, of course.)

    I’m also doing a reading from my own fiction at 8:00 pm on Thursday, in ExecSalon 3. Come hear my silly story about ancient Romans!

    Temperatures are supposed to be in the high 80s in San Antonio, which will be a nice change from Boston, where it’s finally gotten chilly. (Not that chilly, though; I still don’t think we’ve had frost, and there are years I’ve had to start wearing long underwear by October’s end.)

  • Worlds without eggs

    I haven’t liked eggs since I was 3 years old.  Eggs as ingredients don’t bother me–in cake, custard, ice-cream, meringue, chocolate mousse, chocolate soufflé, pancakes, waffles–I just don’t think of them as food.  I don’t eat flour straight out of the bag, either.

    Which is why characters in my pre-Industrial fantasy stories don’t eat nearly as many eggs as they should.

    In my last post on food in fantasy fiction, I argued that the much-maligned stew was a perfectly reasonable meal for your characters to eat, even though they wouldn’t be cooking it while trekking through the wilderness on some epic quest; but that you, as the author, shouldn’t be lazy and write simply that they ate “stew” without telling the reader what went into it.  I promised to write more about worldbuilding through food, and hinted that I might be talking about eggs next.

    Humans have been eating eggs since prehistory, and chickens may have been domesticated as early as 6000 BC.  The ancient Roman Apicius cookery manual has recipes for eggs.  Here’s a sauce that includes egg yolk as an ingredient:

    9.3.2 Sauce for stuffed squid: pepper, lovage, coriander, celery seed, egg yolk, honey, vinegar, liquamen [fish sauce], wine and oil.  Thicken it.

    Most of the Apicius recipes are just a list of ingredients, without quantities and with few if any instructions.  But this sauce sounds suspiciously like a flavored mayonnaise.  (The Romans ate many food items that would be familiar to a modern Western diner.  Chicken wings were apparently a popular snack–wing bones have been excavated from underneath ancient public baths, along with lamb chop bones, olive pits, and nut shells.)

    Eggs are usually the main ingredient in the ancient Roman dish known as a patina.  A sample recipe:

    4.2.5 Another patina, of asparagus [served] cold: take prepared asparagus, pound in a mortar, pour on water and pound thoroughly; strain through a colander.  Put prepared figpecker [a small songbird] to one side.  Pound in a mortar 6 scruples [1/4 oz] of pepper, add liquamen, grind again.  Add a cyathus [1/12 pt] of wine, a cyathus of passum; pour into a pan [with] 3 oz of oil.  Let it come to heat there.  Grease a dish.  In it mix 6 eggs with oenogarum [i.e., the peppered liquamen-wine-passum-oil mixture described above]; put this with the asparagus liquor in hot embers.  Then arrange the figpeckers, cook, sprinkle with pepper and serve.

    Apicius has several patina recipes, named after the pan they were cooked in.  This was like a shallow covered casserole dish with a raised lip all around the lid that would hold hot embers on top and allow you to heat the contents of the pan from both top and bottom.  As far as I can tell, the patina is a lot like an Italian fritatta.  Persian cuisine has a similar dish called a kuku, and according to my Persian cookbook, it was traditionally cooked exactly the same way as the Roman patina, in the same sort of pan.

    Eggs weren’t necessarily cheap in pre-Industrial societies, but they were less expensive than meat, and they stay fresh longer.  Most Americans and Canadians these days keep their eggs in the fridge, but it isn’t necessary if the eggs haven’t been washed before reaching the consumer.  Unrefrigerated, unwashed eggs will easily last about 3 weeks.  Meat … not so much.  Eggs are quick and easy to cook, requiring no specialized equipment.  They might be a bit fragile to carry on a long journey, but people would certainly eat them in their own homes and in taverns and inns.  In fact, “eggs and bacon” is one of the food options Sancho Panza asks the landlord about in that Don Quixote passage I mentioned in my post on stew, although as a supper rather than a breakfast item.

    Eggs are popular in non-Western cuisines, too.  China has century eggs and salted duck eggs, and steamed eggs (similar to an omelet) are a traditional dish.  Omelet variations (including the aforementioned frittatas and kukus) are cooked and eaten around the world (from tortilla de patatas in Spain to tamagoyaki in Japan).  Cilbir, a Turkish preparation of poached eggs and yogurt, goes back to at least the 15th century.  Eggs aren’t typically eaten by Indian vegetarians, but egg dishes are popular among the Parsi community and other omnivores.

    So why don’t more characters in historically-based fantasy fiction eat eggs?  I know that I neglect to think of eggs as a viable food option for my characters because I don’t think of them as a viable food option for myself.  But what’s everyone else’s excuse?

    Perhaps it’s because the food described in fantasy fiction isn’t supposed to represent what members of a culture with a particular environment and technology level would actually eat.  Fantasy food is either aspirational or revolting–lavish descriptions of banquets with at least a dozen courses of roast meat, or bland stews with unrecognizable root vegetables boiled into submission.  And on one level, this makes sense.  You’re probably not writing that six-volume epic fantasy series because you wanted your readers to imagine what the various members of your made-up society might eat for breakfast–if they eat breakfast, which not every culture does–and how their breakfasts might be different from those in Middle Earth, or Narnia, or Westeros.  The problem, though, is that it’s all too easy to fall into overused food clichés, where your characters eat exactly what the reader imagined they would before ever opening your novel.  And at that point, why mention the food at all?

    So, next time your characters stop for dinner, whether at an inn or someone’s home, why not offer them an omelet instead of stew?

  • Ancient Roman Pork Kebabs, Apicius 8.1.9

    I’ve written elsewhere (here, here, and here) about my attempts to cook ancient Roman food.  Until now, I’ve followed adaptations of ancient recipes worked out for use in modern kitchens, with quantities and preparation notes.  But I was making grilled pork kebabs as one menu item for a dinner party with friends and I wanted to try something new for the dipping sauce, something I hadn’t tried before.

    Donald always appreciates ancient Roman food, and there are four sauce recipes in Sally Grainger’s Cooking Apicius that would have been appropriate.  I’d already tried two of them, though (I liked one but not the other, possibly because of all the tinkering I had to do with the recipe due to not being able to acquire all the ingredients here in the US).  And of the others, one calls for myrtle berries, which we can’t get (we bought a myrtle plant that we’ve been babying along and carefully moving inside each winter, but still no flowers or berries), and the other for hard-boiled eggs, which I don’t like.

    Also, I’ve been going to the trouble of growing rue and pennyroyal from seed so that I have them on hand for the recipes that require them, and I wanted to use some of the fresh rue.  So I went back to Grocock and Grainger’s straight-up translation of the Apicius cookery manual to see what I could find.

    8.1.9.  Another sauce for boar:  pound pepper, lovage, oregano, celery seed, laser root, cumin, fennel seed, rue, liquamen, wine, passum.  Bring it to heat; when it is simmering, thicken with starch.  Pour the sauce into and over the boar and serve.

    Sounds promising.  I was using ambiguously labeled “pork kebab meat” from our meat CSA, not wild boar, but it was free-range pork.  And the Romans often cooked food over charcoal (many of the more convenient methods not having been invented yet).  Laser is silphium, but that was already extinct by the time most of these recipes were being written down, so they were using asafetida instead.  Liquamen is fish sauce, and ancient Roman fish sauce was pretty close to modern Thai or Vietnamese.  Passum was a sweet wine made from dried grapes.  I always use Passito di Pantelleria, which is probably the best modern approximation (Wikipedia says so, anyway).  The one made by Cantine Pellegrino is available at a local wine and spirits retailer (this is the modern, fancy term for liquor store).

    I didn’t follow the instructions exactly.  Partly because I wanted to marinate the pork in the mixture before grilling it, as well as using it as a dipping sauce.  Here’s my recipe:

    Ingredients
    1 tsp. lovage seed
    1 tsp. celery seed
    1/2 tsp. cumin seed
    1/2 tsp. fennel seed
    1/4 tsp. ground asafetida
    1 tsp. peppercorns
    1 tbsp. finely chopped fresh lovage
    1 tsp. minced fresh oregano
    1 tsp. minced fresh rue
    3/4 c. dry white Italian wine
    1/4 c. Passito di Pantelleria
    2 tbsp. Vietnamese or Thai fish sauce
    2 tbsp. olive oil
    1 1/4 lb. pork kebab meat (I wouldn’t be so vague about where on the animal the meat came from, except that I don’t know. Legs, maybe? Loin? Anything you’d use for grilling, frying, or roasting (rather than braising or stewing), cut into approximately 2-inch chunks, is probably fine.)

    Directions
    In a small skillet over moderately low heat, toast lovage seed, celery seed, cumin seed, fennel seed, and ground asafetida until fragrant, while stirring. Cool slightly, then grind with the peppercorns in a spice grinder or mortar and pestle. Add wine, Passito, fish sauce, and fresh herbs. Divide mixture into 2 equal portions. Reserve half of the mixture to use as a dipping sauce. To the other half, add the olive oil. Marinate the pork kebabs in the mixture that contains olive oil for 2-24 hours (In the fridge, of course. Ancient Romans didn’t have fridges, but the ancient text says nothing about marinating in this mixture, either.)

    Thread the pork kebabs onto skewers and grill to desired doneness. You could broil them instead, if it were raining or too cold to grill. I’m not giving precise instructions here based on what I did, because I was trying to grill-roast a whole chicken at the same time (that’s another possible blog post), and my grilling of the pork didn’t receive the close attention it deserved. My kebabs were cooked through more than I like (medium-well rather than medium-rare, though if you’re still afraid of trichinosis this may be more to your liking (ancient Romans were probably afraid of trichinosis, too)), and not seared enough on the outside because I was using briquettes instead of hardwood charcoal to get the chicken right. Also, the pork got cold before we got around to eating it, because the chicken took longer. But the hickory wood chunks I was using to flavor the chicken gave the pork a nice, smoky flavor.

    Serve the grilled pork with the dipping sauce.

    If you compare this to the original Apicius recipe, you’ll see I didn’t bother heating the sauce once it had been assembled, and didn’t bother thickening it, either.  I could have, though cornstarch isn’t strictly authentic, as the ancient Romans didn’t have corn.  You could use wheat starch, often available in Asian grocery stores near the rice flour, if you were striving for verisimilitude.

    Of course, you’re going to have trouble duplicating this recipe if you don’t grow your own lovage and rue, as they’re not easy to find.  I have seen fresh lovage, still growing in little pots, at the Lexington farmers’ market here in Massachusetts.  You could substitute celery leaves for the fresh lovage, or just leave it out.  I used organic lovage seeds sold for planting rather than culinary purposes, and lovage seeds are not too difficult to find.  If you haven’t just spent the last several months growing your own fresh rue, you’re probably out of luck, though some friends of mine who used to live in Park Slope, in Brooklyn, told me they’ve seen it at the farmers’ market there on occasion.  Before we had rue, we would substitute fresh fenugreek leaves in ancient recipes that called for it (fresh fenugreek is available at well-stocked Indian grocery stores), or dandelion leaves.  Rue is quite bitter, so you’ll get some of the correct flavor that way.  You’d probably want to use a tablespoon of either of these substitutes, as neither is as astoundingly bitter as rue.  Rue also has some interesting flavor notes that you might describe as citrusy, though, so I don’t think any substitute will be quite right.

    If you want to use rue, keep in mind that it’s, um, mildly toxic.  And should probably not be consumed by pregnant women or those attempting to become pregnant.  It had medicinal as well as culinary uses, and one of those medicinal uses was as an herbal abortifacient.  I’m pretty sure that a teaspoon mixed into a cup of liquid and shared among 3 or more people as a marinade and dipping sauce is not going to hurt anybody or their unborn child.  But I have no real knowledge on the subject.  I informed all our dinner guests of the potential toxicity issue, and you should do the same.

    How did it turn out?  Everyone seemed to enjoy the pork kebabs and dipping sauce.  There are a lot of different flavors in there, but they seem to meld well together.  Donald wants me to try the sauce again, this time using rue in one batch and a rue substitute in the other, to see if there’s any noticeable difference (Donald’s blog post on the dipping sauce is here).  Maybe he’s wondering if growing fresh rue is worth the effort.  It’s supposed to be a perennial herb, though, so I think we’ll have fresh rue as long as we remember to water it from time to time.

  • As the Romans cooked

    Donald got two Roman cookbooks for his last birthday, to add to our collection.  The Classical Cookbook, by Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger, includes both ancient Greek and ancient Roman recipes; Cooking Apicius, by Grainger, is a selection of modernized recipes from the only extant ancient Roman cooking manual.

    I already owned Mark Grant’s Roman Cookery, Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa’s A Taste of Ancient Rome (translated by Anna Herklotz), and Joseph Dommers Vehling’s 1936 translation of the Apicius manual.

    I had found Giacosa’s cookbook more useful and authentic than Grant’s.  Both consist of recipes adapted for a modern kitchen, inspired by ancient food, but Giacosa always starts with the original Latin text for a recipe (usually from Apicius, but occasionally from Cato’s or Columella’s treatises on agriculture).  Then she provides a translation, then a modernized recipe.  This way, you can see her thought process in developing the final recipe.

    Grant’s cookbook doesn’t always provide such clear antecedents, and I’m not as happy with his ingredient substitutions.  He calls for Cheddar in numerous recipes where ricotta, feta, or a simple goat cheese would probably be more authentic.  The ancient Romans used the milk of sheep and goats, but not cows’ milk.  However, the real fatal flaw is his use of meat stock made from bouillon cubes.  I can’t take any cookbook author who recommends bouillon cubes seriously.*

    We did try one recipe from Grant’s cookbook, the one for hydromel, or honey water.  It wasn’t very successful, but I don’t think it’s entirely his fault, as it’s actually one of his most historically authentic recipes, reproducing the exact proportions suggested by Bassus in Country Matters (3:2:1 water/honey/apple juice).  It was far too sweet, even diluted with 3 parts water.  However, as Donald describes on his blog, we were able to salvage it by adding apple cider vinegar.  As I know from wine tasting, sweet drinks aren’t as cloying if they also contain enough acid to balance the sugar.  I’m not sure if the recipe didn’t work because ancient Roman apple juice wasn’t as sweet as modern apple cider, or if the Romans just had a major sweet tooth.  (I should point out that Donald prepared this recipe; he suggested elsewhere on his blog that I may not have been adequately crediting his contributions to our Roman dinners.)

    Giacosa’s cookbook tends to suggest ricotta when an ancient recipe calls for cheese, and allows the cook to decide how they’re going to prepare their stock.  The recipes generally sound more authentic, and more likely to taste good.  Donald and I have prepared her pork stew with apples, and globi.  The pork stew is from Apicius, and the globi are a dessert fritter from Cato.  Both were fairly successful, and I’ve written about this meal elsewhere on my blog.

    I do think that she’s off with her proportions for the pork stew, not enough herb and spice, and too much defrutum (concentrated wine or grape syrup) for sweetening.  Since the original recipes rarely give quantities of ingredients, it really is up to the cook’s discretion.  However, the Latin text calls for “a bit of defrutum“, which Giacosa interprets to mean 1/2 cup for about 2 pounds of meat and a pound of apples.  Donald and I probably didn’t use the best substitute for defrutum.  We used grape juice concentrate from a winemaking store, which I suspect was too sweet and concentrated.  Even so, defrutum was probably very sweet and syrupy, like expensive balsamic vinegar or the Italian sapa you can sometimes buy from specialty food stores.  1/2 cup is a lot.

    Another issue is that, throughout her cookbook, Giacosa suggests substituting the juice of pressed garlic cloves for laser or laser root.  This may have been necessary in 1986 when her book was first published, in Italy.  But it isn’t necessary today for anyone with access to an Indian grocery store (either in their city or online).  Laser originally meant silphium, an aromatic plant that became extinct about 2000 years ago, but by the time the Apicius recipes were being written down, cooks were using asafoetida as a substitute.  You may not even need an Indian grocery to find asafoetida.  I have a bottle I purchased at Whole Foods.

    Donald and I haven’t tried any recipes from The Classical Cookbook, but I’ve prepared several dishes from Cooking Apicius:  lamb faggots (the cookbook was published in Britain; the American translation of Giacosa’s cookbook uses the less unfortunate term “meat patties” for the Latin isicia), prawn (shrimp) balls in hydrogarum, toasted pine kernel sauce for roast wild boar or pork (I served it with pan-fried pork chops), offellae Ostian style, offellae Apician style (offellae are chunks of roasted or grilled pork belly), spring cabbage with cumin, parsnips in a cumin honey glaze, sauce for fried gourd (accompanied by fried gourd), and deep-fried honey fritters.  Everything has been quite good, the pork belly recipes in particular having been big hits at dinner parties or potlucks.  If anything, compared to Giacosa, Grainger has an excessively liberal hand with the spicing.  I think she puts in way too much cumin, in particular.  It may be that the cumin I buy is especially fresh and flavorful; or it may be that I just don’t like cumin as much as she does.  Her recipes have a lot of pepper, too, but, judging from our experience with conditum paradoxum, one of the few Apicius recipes to provide quantities, Romans liked their pepper.

    Grainger doesn’t mess around with trying to substitute garlic for laser; she tells you to get yourself some asafoetida, as you should.  And, unlike both Grant and Giacosa, she acknowledges that the ancient Romans did not have zucchini or butternut squash (both New World vegetables unknown in Rome prior to the 16th century), and that Apician references to cucurbitas were to Old World gourds.  I used opo squash, which is often used today in Indian cooking.  It’s not that unlike zucchini, but if you’re trying for some degree of authenticity, you definitely shouldn’t be using any of the yellow or orange winter squashes.

    So, I have to say, Sally Grainger wins the Roman cookbook prize.  Donald and I were so impressed with Cooking Apicius that we decided to purchase Grainger and Grocock’s complete English translation of the Apicius manual (“A Critical Edition with an Introduction and English Translation”), which has the Latin on one side, English on the facing page, and notes and appendices that take up more space than the actual text.

    Cooking Apicius does call for ingredients that are not presently easy to find in the United States:  myrtle berries, lovage seed, date syrup, fresh rue and pennyroyal.  If you’re an experienced cook, you can probably figure out appropriate substitutions, or else stick to the recipes that don’t use them.  Lovage seed and rue are the most problematic, as Grainger uses them in so many of the recipes.  I did buy some rue seeds to try growing the fresh herb myself, but in the meantime I’ve been substituting some bitter fresh green–I’ve tried dandelion, and might also try arugula or fenugreek leaves (all of which the Romans would have had).  I’ve tried substituting either celery seed or ajwain seed for lovage, with good results.  Or you could buy lovage seeds intended for planting in your garden.  Make sure they’re organic, not treated with any fungicide or other toxic chemical.  You’ll probably have to pick out the seeds from the bits of twig and leaf, since planting seeds aren’t sorted as carefully as eating seeds.  (This is one of Donald’s tasks when I cook ancient Roman food.)  Also, while I’m confident enough that they’re safe to eat that I’ve fed dishes containing them to friends, they’re probably not really approved for human consumption, so eat them at your own risk.  On that same note, there’s some toxicity associated with rue and pennyroyal, although my reading on the subject suggests that the fresh herb is probably safe to eat.  Just don’t go making yourself herbal teas with the stuff unless you really know what you’re doing, and stay away from the extracts.  (There have been some accidental poisoning deaths from pennyroyal extract in particular.)

    When you’re trying to re-enact a historical practice, whether cooking, costuming, or jousting, you always have to make choices about how authentic you’re going to be.  I’ve done all my ancient Roman cooking on my gas stove in my modern American kitchen, but if I wanted to be truly authentic, I’d have to build a reproduction clay oven in my backyard, or at least cook over charcoal in my Weber grill.  Then there are the ingredients.  I can decide to use goats’ milk instead of cows’ milk, and avoid New World ingredients.  But vegetables have changed in 2000 years.  The ancient Romans didn’t have bright orange carrots.  Theirs were white or pale yellow, more like parsnips.  It’s unclear which of the Brassica oleracea they meant by cymae and coliculi–various members of the cabbage family, and we know they didn’t have Brussels sprouts yet, but were they headed cabbages, or something more like kale or collard greens, or even broccoli?  I won’t even get into the whole issue of how wheat has changed over the millennia.

    However, if you want a cookbook that strikes a good balance between historical authenticity and ease of preparation, with recipes that taste good, I recommend Sally Grainger’s Cooking Apicius.

    *This is not entirely true.  One of the recipes in Cooking Apicius calls for “lamb stock (cube or fresh)”.  I’m willing to forgive Grainger here because lamb stock is a little harder to find than chicken or beef (though I’m not sure I’ve ever seen lamb Oxo cubes here in the US; it would probably be easier for me to buy some bony lamb pieces and make my own stock).  Grant calls for a chicken stock cube in at least one recipe in his cookbook.  That’s simply unacceptable, unless you live in, say, post-war Britain in the 50s.

  • Conditum paradoxum

    As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, one of the things my husband Donald and I share is a fascination with the culture of ancient Rome.  Since I also love to cook, this leads inexorably to our attempts to recreate ancient Roman food and beverages.  I say “our” even though it’s usually me doing the cooking.  Donald is there for encouragement.  Such as, “We haven’t had any Roman food in a while.”  Or, “When are you going to cook some more Roman food?”  He does help with the dishes.

    One ancient Roman recipe I’ve made twice now is conditum paradoxum, from Apicius, the most famous ancient Roman cookbook.  Depending on the translation, conditum paradoxum means “marvelous seasoned wine”, “novelty spiced wine”, or “spiced wine surprise”.

    Unlike most recipes in Apicius, the instructions for conditum paradoxum include both procedure and exact proportions.  Donald has the original Latin on his blog.  Here’s a translation (Grocock, Christopher, and Sally Grainger. Apicius:  A Critical Edition with an Introduction and English Translation.  Blackawton:  Prospect Books, 2006.  Print.).  Except I left the ancient units untranslated instead of calling them pounds, ounces and pints, because they’re not exactly the same as the modern equivalents.

    15 librae of honey by weight is put into a bronze pan containing 2 sextarii of wine so that the wine and the honey cook together.  Warm the pan on a gentle fire of dry wood and stir with a stick as it cooks.  If it begins to boil it is settled with a sprinkling of wine, besides which it will subside when it is removed from the fire.  When it has cooled down, it is heated again.  This will be done a second and a third time, and then at last it is removed from the hearth, and it is skimmed the day after.  Then you put in 4 unciae of ground pepper; 3 scruples of  mastic; one dragma each of folium and saffron; 5 roasted date stones and the dates themselves softened in wine of the same kind and quality, added in beforehand so that a smooth paste is produced.  When all these are ready you pour on 18 sextarii of smooth wine.  Charcoal is put in when it is finished (to avert the sour taste).

    One thing that becomes quickly apparent if you look around for modern adaptations of this recipe is that no one these days likes  the Apicius proportions.  Everyone cuts way back on the honey.  However, although the original does call for about 11 pounds of honey in 11 liters of wine, the ancients didn’t drink their wine straight.  As far as we can tell, they cut it with at least 3 parts water to every 1 part wine.  Modern interpretations Donald and I have seen all try to produce a spiced wine that you could enjoy drinking unwatered, but that isn’t authentic, nor do I think it’s necessary.

    I used the original proportions, scaling them down for 1.5 liters of wine (2 standard bottles).  That comes out to:

    1.5 liters wine
    15 grams ground pepper
    682 grams honey
    1 roasted date pit
    1 pitted date soaked in a bit of the wine
    0.63 grams folium
    0.63 grams saffron (I used 0.5 g, since this is the smallest size available from Penzeys Spices down the street)
    0.48 grams mastic (9-10 beads)

    Scholars don’t know what was meant by folium, which means, simply, “leaf”.  Some think it’s bay leaf, which the Romans usually called folium lauri; others think it’s tejpat leaf, which the Romans usually called malabathrum.  I used tejpat, which I obtained from Kalustyan’s in Manhattan (they do mail order).  You could use bay leaf if you wanted.  Maybe the original recipe is vague because it didn’t matter which one you used.

    We got gum mastic from Amazon.  It’s a hardened resin, and comes in a jar of small beads.

    You’ll notice that the quantities of a lot of the spices are pretty small.  You’re probably going to need an electronic scale if you want to try this yourself.  Even then, unless you have access to an analytical balance (and if you have one of those at home, I don’t want to know why), your scale probably won’t measure small enough quantities with any degree of accuracy.  Mine doesn’t register weights smaller than a gram, so for the tejpat leaf and mastic, we would weigh out 4 or 10 times what we needed, then take a quarter or a tenth of that pile, judging by eyeing it.  Not very accurate, but I’m not sure it matters.  There’s a lot of pepper in there, and saffron is a very strong-tasting spice.  I’m not even 100% sure that I would be able to taste the difference if I left out the tejpat leaf and gum mastic.  So far, I haven’t tried that.

    If you don’t have an electronic balance, you could try making the recipe in the original quantity.  A sextarius is 0.54 liters, and the original recipe calls for a total of 20 sextarii of wine, so if you’re good at math (or ancient Roman weights and measures), you can figure out how much of everything you’ll need.  That will make a lot of spiced wine, though.  You’ll need a big pot.

    As for preparation, the original procedure is from a time of more primitive kitchens.  And of more primitive beekeeping.  The multiple cycles of heating and cooling the honey and wine, then skimming, are probably because ancient bulk honey (cheap enough to be used in 11 pound quantities) had a lot more gunk in it (wax, bits of dead bees, pollen).  These days, it’s difficult to find honey like that, and you have to pay extra for it, at Whole Foods or some similar store.  I didn’t bother with the skimming.  I heated the honey with 150 mL wine.  (Don’t get nervous about the metric units if you live in the United States, like I do.  Your measuring cups should have metric as well as Imperial units.  Unless you bought the really cheap ones.  If that sounds like you, go get some proper measuring cups before making this recipe.  Right now!)  Use medium low or low heat, and stir it a lot.  When you measure the honey and wine into the pot, you’ll think “This recipe will never work; it’s as thick as molasses!”  Don’t worry, the honey liquifies as you heat.

    The first time I made this, I used Greek retsina for the wine.  Some people think that’s closer to the wine they would have had in the ancient world, since they often used pine resin to waterproof the clay amphorae in which they stored it.  The second time I made the recipe, I used a 1.5 liter bottle of inexpensive Italian pinot grigio.  I didn’t taste them side by side or anything, but I don’t remember one tasting different from the other.  Use something dry with a decent level of acidity, and don’t spend too much money on it, because you won’t be able to taste any subtlety in the wine anyway.

    The recipe doesn’t say anything about how long the spices are supposed to sit in the wine and honey syrup before you add the rest of the wine.  It also doesn’t say whether you’re supposed to grind the mastic and date pit, or just toss them in.  Or how long to roast the date pit.  The first time, I roasted the date pit for about an hour at 350 F, then ground both it and the mastic (separately) in a coffee grinder before adding them to the pot.  The second time, I only roasted the pit for half an hour (which I think was still too long), and just crushed it in a mortar and pestle (the mortar and pestle is also good for smushing the soaked date).  I didn’t grind the mastic at all, the second time.  This is because mastic, a resin, is kind of sticky, and it was a pain to get it out of the coffee grinder into the pot, and then a double pain to clean the coffee grinder.  After adding the spices, I kept the pot on the lowest heat for about half an hour, stirring every now and then.  It shouldn’t boil, so if your stove doesn’t have a really low heat setting, you might have to switch it between on and off.  You could also just let it steep for an hour or so, like tea.

    The second time, when I added the whole mastic beads to the pot instead of grinding them, I was sort of hoping they would melt or dissolve into the mix.  They did soften, but they never entirely went away, and the mixture was starting to boil, so I gave up.  I learned afterwards that mastic doesn’t dissolve in water and is only slightly soluble in alcohol.  Apparently, it can take days to dissolve it in pure alcohol at room temperature.  Also, according to one of the customer reviews on Amazon, I was supposed to rinse the beads off before using them, because they’re covered with a very fine sand.  Hmm.  Next time, I guess.

    Once you’ve decided the honey wine syrup has melded with the spices long enough, add the rest of the wine.  Then strain out the spices.  I didn’t bother with the charcoal.  Partly because the recipe is unclear about how the charcoal is used, and partly because I wasn’t confident that the hardwood charcoal I buy for the grill should be added to food.  However, I’ve used charcoal in the chemistry lab to decolor and clarify solutions, so I suspect that the proper procedure for this is to add a spoonful or two of ground charcoal, bring to a simmer, then strain.  If you do want to try this, you will need to strain it through a coffee filter.  Otherwise you won’t have clarified the wine at all, you’ll just have added unsightly black dust to the bottom.  Cheesecloth isn’t fine enough.

    Since I didn’t use charcoal, I didn’t even both straining through cheesecloth, I just used a fine mesh strainer.  It doesn’t get rid of all the spice sludge, but I was lazy, and decided that the spice sludge added character.  It it at least removes all the large chunks.

    Now you have conditum paradoxum.  It should taste mostly of honey and saffron, with a bit of a peppery bite.  Like I said earlier, you won’t want to drink this straight.  It’s way too sweet and syrupy.  3 parts water to 1 part spiced wine works pretty well.  Or, if you want to throw away all the historical authenticity for which you’ve labored so hard, use sparkling water or club soda as the mixer.

    Even diluted, it still tastes mostly of honey and saffron, and pepper.  The wine gives it a necessary dose of acidity, though, balancing the sweetness.

    It actually made me think of a wine cooler, especially the sparkling variation.  Very sweet, flavored, not too alcoholic.  One of the most fascinating things about trying to reproduce ancient food–or cooking food from contemporary cultures around the world, for that matter–is noticing unexpected similarities between the foreign and the familiar.

    If you’re interested in either ancient Rome or food history, check out my earlier post on cooking ancient Roman food.  And stay tuned for future posts, where (assuming I get around to writing them) you can read all about The Search for Ancient Spices No One Uses Anymore, Sometimes Because They’re Poisonous, and How Ancient Roman Food is Like Thai Cooking.

  • Arisia 2012

    A couple of weekends ago, I attended Arisia, one of Boston’s local science fiction conventions.  I usually think of Arisia as more of a party convention than a writers’ convention.  I’ve attended Arisia in past years without sitting in on a single panel.  (Though I may have done this at Readercon, too; panels aren’t my favorite thing about cons.)  And I tend to run into more non-writer than writer friends.

    This year was different, though.  For better or worse, I was fighting off a cold the entire weekend, so I was a lot more careful about trying to get enough sleep, and ended up not going to nearly as many parties (I didn’t feel I could justify the cost of staying in the hotel for the weekend, since home was a T- or cab ride away).  And, oddly, there were actually panels and other items on the program for which I was willing to show up early in the morning!  Often there isn’t much on the program of particular interest to writers, except maybe for absolute beginners (e.g., “How to Get Your First Story Published”).  This year’s program was definitely an exception.  And I ran into plenty of writers and editors, too.

    I didn’t take any pictures to liven up my post, so I’ll try to make the paragraphs short instead of one long, mind-numbing block of text.

    Here’s a summary of all the stuff on the official program that I actually attended:

    The Super Robots (Beast King Golion)
    I was going to go to a panel that someone from my writers group was on. Then I realized that there was a screening of Voltron in the original Japanese (with English subtitles) going on at the same time! Sorry, Jen. I was obsessed with Voltron as a child. I even sent away for membership in the official Voltron fan club (sadly, I threw out all the posters and stickers once I thought I’d outgrown them–but they live on, in my heart). My sister and I wrote Voltron fan fic (again, sadly, I don’t think any of this has survived through the ages). Voltron was “re-edited and re-recorded for American audiences” from a Japanese show called Beast King Golion. Golion as in Goliath, the Biblical giant. Only with lions. (“I wonder why they changed the name” my sister quipped.) Beast King Golion hasn’t been damaged by the Suck Fairy as badly as the American version has, though there are numerous plot points that don’t pass adult scrutiny (like the whole escaping from the tower by using vultures as hang gliders sequence).  There’s a lot more swearing, though, which apparently was edited out for the American audience.  And I’m pretty sure the Voltron we watched as children wasn’t so violent and bloody (my parents were allowing my 5-year old sister to watch this, after all).  But the animation was the same.  They showed several episodes, but I had to leave before we got to the one where all the 5 lions join together to form Voltron.  I mean, Golion.

    That was a long paragraph, wasn’t it?  That just shows you what a special place Voltron has in my heart, even after all these years.

    A Roman Legion: Legio III Cyrenaica
    Those who know me well and have read various drafts of my novel-in-progress know that I love Romans as much as I love elves. Maybe more! So, even though I had to be at the convention at 11:00 am for this (don’t laugh, it’s a long commute and it takes me a long time to get ready in the mornings), I couldn’t miss the opportunity to see these representatives from a Roman reenactment group, in their lorica segmentata and caligae. It was very exciting! They were only on the program for 30 minutes, but they should have had a longer time slot, because they went over time and people in the audience still had questions. It was a small audience, but an enthusiastic one. I learned that the legionaries started carrying the gladius (i.e., sword) on a baldric over their shoulder instead of on a waist belt around the same time they switched to the segmented plate armor from chain mail. The reenactors theorize, based on trying out different bits of equipment, that they started doing this because the waist belt slides more over the plate armor than over chain mail, and it no longer held the weight of the gladius without slipping down.

    That was a long paragraph, too. I probably love Romans even more than I love Voltron!

    Don’t Quit Your Day Job
    Since I have quit my day job (actually, my day job quit me), I found this of interest. Also, Jennifer Pelland from my writers group was on the panel. The authors on the panel were all pretty much against the idea of quitting one’s day job, which I suppose fits with the title and description. I’m happy not to have a day job for right now, but I think I have a pretty realistic set of expectations about the fame and fortune I’m likely to achieve as a result. Also, I went into it pretty carefully. I’d been saving money for several years before I was laid off, and don’t intend to use my retirement savings or go without health insurance. I’ll try to find another job long before it comes to that, or at least move back in with my parents. (Just kidding, Mom!)

    Winter is Coming
    A panel discussing George R. R. Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire, of which I’m a huge fan (though I still like Romans better). It was a fun and interesting discussion, with plenty of audience participation. Though there a lot of Johnny-come-latelies jumping on the bandwagon with the immense popularity of the HBO series, I have to say. Two of the panelists (the purported experts) admitted that they’d only read the books for the first time within the last year! As someone who has been a member of the Brotherhood Without Banners fan club since 2006 (and even that’s not very long, relatively speaking), I’m a little shocked that such newbies are getting to be on panels as experts on the series! (Okay, I’m not the most active member in the world. I do have a cool secret identity name though! (it’s said that there’s a fine line between cool and dorky)).

    Plot and Structure
    The panel description reads “It is often remarked that there are only six original plots. How then do you make the plot of your story stand out?” Which sounded interesting enough, but the actual panel was even more interesting than I’d expected, a lot of talk about writing craft, outlining stories vs. making them up as you go along. A counterpoint to the “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” panel, in some ways, with one of the panelists coming right out and saying (more or less) that you needed to write stories people wanted to read if you were going to pay the mortgage. Whereas on that other panel, one of the main reasons given for not quitting your day job was the freedom to write whatever you wanted.

    2,326 Worlds And Counting
    A science talk on planets outside our solar system. Science is getting better at detecting smaller planets around other stars. The latest research suggests there are probably a few billion Earth-sized rocky planets in our galaxy that are capable of supporting intelligent life (i.e., at a distance from their sun such that liquid water could exist on the surface). Scientists used to think planet formation was rare, but now that we have techniques that can detect planets, it turns out that most stars have them.

    Why You Should/Should Not Self-Publish
    This probably ought to have been called “Why You Should Not Self-Publish”. Or “Why Would You Even Think of Self-Publishing, You Idiot”? Everyone on the panel (including one panelist who had self-published) basically said you shouldn’t do it except as a last resort. I have mixed feelings about that message. I do think that a lot of writers who are just starting out need to hear the things that were said. That trying to go with a traditional publisher can keep you from embarrassing yourself by putting out a crappy book that you’ll be horribly ashamed of in 10 years. That most customers aren’t going to give you a second chance: if they read a book of yours and it sucks, they’ll probably never buy anything else you ever write (unless they’re your mom). That most self-published books are awful, and most people will assume your book is awful if you self-publish it. That if you want to self-publish and you want your book to have a chance, it’s not just formatting your book on CreateSpace and clicking on a button; it’s expensive and time-consuming, because you have to pay for cover art and design, copyediting, and formatting. And you have to do all your own marketing. No random stranger is going to choose your book out of all the millions of others out there. That self-publishing will probably ruin any chance you had of getting a different book published by a major publisher later on, because (my analogy) publishing is like a medieval marriage in that the publisher expects the author to be pure and unsullied, and views self-publishing more or less as a medieval husband-to-be would view premarital prostitution. These things are all true, and yet…. Not everyone wants a book deal from a major New York house (not if they have to sell their soul and change their name to get it). Some writers can do all the tasks of publishing on their own. Some people aren’t willing to have their manuscript sit on an editor’s desk for 5 years with no answer. And just because you play the traditional publishing game doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed success. Authors are dropped by publishers all the time because their first or second book didn’t sell well enough, and if that happens, you probably will have to self-publish subsequent books (see medieval marriage analogy). As far as I’m concerned, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with self-publishing your work as long as you have realistic expectations for how much work it will be, how little money you’re likely to make, and how unfamous you will be. Hey, just like writing!

    That was a long paragraph, too. I don’t love self-publishing, but I have strong opinions.

    Stitch ‘n’ Bitch
    I recently started crocheting after reading some of my sister’s crocheting and knitting books. I was also envious of the beautiful sock she was knitting, and wanted to be able to make stuff like that. I decided to start with crocheting though, because I’ve heard it’s easier. The book I used to teach myself is from the Stitch ‘n’ Bitch series. My sister has a copy, and I ended up getting my own. Anyway, there are Stitch ‘n’ Bitch gatherings where you meet up with a bunch of other knitters and/or crocheters and work on your stuff, and chat. (Stitch, and bitch. Get it?) And they had one at Arisia. So I went, and worked on my scarf. I’m making a striped scarf as my first project ever. It’s all single crochet.

    I should mention that I was taking my crocheting to Arisia pretty much every day and working on the scarf while I was sitting in panels. Oddly, I find it easier to pay attention overall if I have something to occupy my hands during the boring bits. Hmm, I wonder if it would look bad if I took my crocheting to church….

    The Future of Religion
    Honestly, I don’t know why I go to these panels, because I just get annoyed. (Though sometimes I feel the same way about church.) According to a show of hands, I was the only audience member who considered themself a monotheist (one of the panelists was also a monotheist). That wasn’t the annoying part; it felt awkward to have identified myself as a minority, but it’s good for all of us to be in the minority sometimes. The things that did annoy me were: (1) the extreme anti-religious attitude of one of the panelists, who was often pretty condescending about how religious people are weak-willed, etc., etc. (an audience member did respectfully call him out on it); and (2) predictions of religion’s future were very western-focused (societies will become less religious as they become more technologically advanced, etc.) with no reference to how religion actually has been changing in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Except for an anti-Muslim comment from one of the non-monotheist panelists.

    I thought the monotheist on the panel (a Unitarian / United Church of Christ minister) did have some very insightful comments, about the nature of the Trinity and other things, and was constantly responding to negative caricatures of religion from the anti-religious guy by saying things like “That’s not what religion is for me”. And it was interesting to hear about the pagan panelist’s journey of faith. Even my irritation is probably a useful thing. It occurred to me when I was so irritated by the anti-religious guy’s comments about how only weak people need religion, and religion is harmful to society (etc.) that it’s probably also very irritating for people who aren’t Christians, the way Christians will often go around telling them they can’t possibly be happy or understand what it’s like to love someone without knowing Jesus. Not that avoiding offending people should be priority number one. But people are usually less likely to want to listen to anything you have to say if they feel you’re being condescending towards them.

    Consistent Magic Systems in Fantasy
    This was sort of the same panel as the one I was on at World Fantasy, at least from the panel description, only this one didn’t get derailed into a debate between a pagan and an atheist as to whether magic really exists. Margaret Ronald from my writers group was on this panel. Interestingly, these panelists were much less insistent on magic in novels having to fit into consistent “systems”. One of the panelists said, “When someone says to me, ‘I’m going to write a fantasy novel, I just have to work out the magic system first’, I start to hear the dice rolling.” Which is exactly (exactly!) my issue with what I see as excessive emphasis on magic systems. (I think it was Joshua Palmatier who said this. One of the disadvantages of writing a con report 2 weeks after the con is that I have trouble remembering who said what on which panel.) One of the panelists (David Sklar, I think) even came out pretty strongly against having magic systems, and felt that that makes the magic feel less authentic (others were more for magic systems, though not as strongly as the other authors I was on a panel with at World Fantasy). (I should say that none of the authors were advocating having the magic conveniently do whatever the plot seems to need at any given time, because that feels pretty fake, too.)

    Among the Ruins
    About how in fantasy novels there are all these ruins from civilizations with better technology, and why does no one in these novels ever seem to wonder overmuch about who these vanished civilizations actually were, except when they’re picking up a jeweled dagger lying in the middle of the street or something. More fantasy stories about archaeologists! Like the religion panel, I thought this one also suffered a bit from assuming that all possible human societies are just like ours in every significant way. I mean, most people in most cultures (real and imagined) are probably too busy working to spend a lot of time trying to understand Those Who Came Before. Look at Rome. The old forums with their temples were buried under centuries of rubble and garbage, and mostly the only attention that got paid to the ruins by the people who lived over them was to scavenge good marble from old buildings. Though I suppose most people in most cultures are also too busy and/or impoverished to become rogue adventurers or set out on a mission to save the world. (Damn you, realism!)

    So, lots of good panels; or at least, panels that sounded interesting enough in the program book to lure me there even at the expense of partying/staying-up-late time.

    There was some drama about the Barfleet party getting shut down on Saturday night (Barfleet is an organization that exists solely for the purpose of throwing parties at science fiction conventions).  I heard various things from different sources, but as far as I can tell, even though Arisia’s contract with the hotel specifies that the hotel will not put non-convention guests on floors designated as party floors, they had a last-minute cancellation and stuck a non-convention attendee in the room right next to Barfleet, and this person complained to hotel security about all the noise Barfleet partygoers were making at 8:30 p.m., so hotel security went and shut the party down.  Rumor has it that they weren’t very gracious or polite about it, either, and confiscated all the alcohol, citing violation of Massachusetts state law, even though I think Barfleet is pretty careful about that sort of thing:  it was a closed-door party and wasn’t advertised at the con, so I think it qualifies as a private party, which means serving alcohol should have been fine, at least as far as I understand things.  Also, in my experience, Barfleet won’t let anyone into their parties without proof of ID.  Anyway, everything I’m saying about what happened at Arisia w.r.t. the Barfleet party is hearsay and speculation.  But a lot of people were really upset about the incident.  (I’m sure the poor hotel guest stuck in the room next to them was also justifiably upset, but the hotel knew that there were going to be parties on that floor and really shouldn’t have booked them there.  This hotel is generally kind of lame about that sort of thing.  I know of people who’ve been put in rooms on the party floor at Boskone after requesting a quiet room.  Also, some of the staff are really rude and snippy.  Most of them are actually very gracious and helpful, but it’s always easier to remember the mean ones.)

    The next convention on my schedule is Boskone, the 3rd weekend in February (Presidents’ Day weekend).  Also here in Boston.  So, if you’re there, I hope to run into you!

  • Donald’s story out in Daily Science Fiction

    It’s been over a month since I last posted. Shame on me! However, having not yet discovered the magic formula where I avoid distractions all day and get as much writing done as I think I should, I figured I would at least use the time spent sitting at my computer for actual fiction writing, rather than blogging about fiction writing (or about all the cooking I’m doing instead of fiction writing).

    I would be remiss in my wifely duties, though, if I failed to mention that my husband Donald’s short story “Her Majesty’s Guardian” is now out in Daily Science Fiction, an excellent online magazine.  If you’re already a subscriber, you would have received this in your email inbox a week ago, but now it’s live on the website for everyone to enjoy.  It’s a great story, and very short, so I hope you’ll all have a chance to read it.

    Here’s a picture of Donald for you to enjoy, from our Italian honeymoon back in May.  This was taken in an ancient tavern in Ostia Antica, the old port of Rome at the mouth of the Tiber River.

    Donald posing as an ancient Roman bartender

    Speaking of ancient Rome, Donald and I are thrilled to be “embark[ing] on a culinary exploration of ancient Pompeii” tonight, with help from the Museum of Science.  Donald is excited that all the courses include some sort of meat.  I’m hoping that the wine pairings won’t be served traditional style (i.e., diluted 3:1 with water).

  • The Joy of … Research

    While thumbing through the Lonely Planet guide to Italy on my new Kindle, Donald found a reference to this book.

    From the Publishers Weekly review:

    ‘Colorful frescoes, metal objects or ceramics are shown in 114 illustrations (95 in color), divided among nine chapters explaining ancient societal attitudes toward sex (“Woman on Top: Women’s Liberation in the First Century A.D”; “Laughing at Taboo Sex in the Suburban Baths”), while subheadings like “Priapus, Protection, and Penetration” offer scholarly and personal anecdotes.’

    Since we both write about fantasy worlds inspired by ancient Rome, it would probably be a very useful reference for both of us.

    We’ve not yet added it to our wedding registry, though.

    (Oh, yeah, in case you didn’t notice on Facebook, Donald and I are engaged now. Yay! It’s very exciting, though a little overwhelming.)