Kristin Janz

Category: Food and drink

  • 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?

  • In Defense of Stew

    From Diana Wynne Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland:

    Stew is the staple food in Fantasyland, so be warned.  You may shortly be longing passionately for omelette, steak, or baked beans, but none of these will be forthcoming, indoors or out.  Stew will be what you are served to eat every single time.  Given the disturbed nature of life in this land, where in camp you are likely to be attacked without warning, and in an inn prone to be the centre of a tavern brawl, Stew seems to be an odd choice as staple food, since, on a rough calculation, it takes forty times as long to prepare as steak.  But it is clear the inhabitants have not yet discovered fast food.  The exact recipe for Stew is of course a Management secret, but it is thought to contain meat of some kind and perhaps even vegetables.  Do not expect a salad on the side.

    So many conventions of epic fantasy make so much less sense when viewed in the harsh light cast by The Tough Guide.  But is stew really one of them?  Many people seem to think so.  You can hardly have your characters sit down to a meal of stew these days without someone in your writers group pouncing on the supposed error.

    And yet, I would argue that complaining too much about stew in historically-based fantasy novels shows a basic lack of understanding of food around the world in general, and of the history of food around the world in particular.

    From Volume 2 of Don Quixote (1615):

    [Don Quixote and Sancho Panza have stopped at an inn for the night, and Sancho Panza asks the innkeeper, or landlord, what they have for food.]

    The landlord responded that he could have anything and could ask for whatever he wanted:  the inn was stocked with the birds of the air, the fowl of the earth, and the fish of the sea.

    [This is followed by several paragraphs of Sancho saying, “Okay, we’ll have this,” and the landlord responding, “Oh, actually we’re out of that”, a la Monty Python’s cheese shop skit.  Finally…]

    “Let’s settle this, for God’s sake,” said Sancho, “and tell me once and for all what you do have, and enough talking, Senor Landlord.”

    “What I really and truly have are two cows’ heels that seem like calves’ feet, or two calves’ feet that seem like cows’ heels; they’re stewed with chickpeas, onions, and bacon, and right now they’re saying, ‘Eat me!  Eat me!’”

    Sounds to me as if stew is actually a fairly authentic meal for your characters, if your imaginary world is at least somewhat based on pre-Industrial Europe.  On the other hand, of course, since Don Quixote is a parody of heroic quest tales, maybe the joke about characters not having anything to eat except stew is older than people realize.

    Obviously, no one’s going to be cooking up a pot of stew over their campfire after marching 20 miles.  But in an inn or tavern, where the proprietor and staff have been there all day?  Perfectly reasonable.  Far more reasonable than steak, in fact.  For one thing, most of the meat on a cow (or any other quadruped) isn’t tender enough to be turned into steak.  It requires long, slow cooking in some kind of liquid (also known as “stewing”).  Even more so before the advent of modern factory farming and feedlot practices.  And, before the invention of refrigeration, most of the meat people ate would have been salted, dried, and/or smoked.  Salted meat especially needs to be soaked and boiled before it’s palatable again–an excellent candidate for stew.  It doesn’t make sense to kill a large animal for fresh meat unless there are enough people around to eat it before it spoils.  So you might do this for a wedding or other special occasion, but the suggestion that a typical inn serving ordinary travelers should specialize in steak instead of stew is a bit ridiculous.

    Another set of issues around fresh meat, at least in temperate climates, are seasonal.  Late fall is the traditional time to butcher large animals, for several reasons.  One is that it’s cool enough to allow you to clean and cut up a cow or pig (or sheep or goat or deer) before the meat spoils (it might even be cool enough that you can safely hang the carcass in a shed for a few days).  But it’s not so cold that your fingers are likely to freeze before you’ve finished.  Also, it’s expensive to keep animals alive through a cold winter, and most of the calories they consume (provided at your expense and inconvenience, since there isn’t any grass for them to graze on) go to maintaining body temperature, not putting on muscle mass (i.e., meat).  Food-to-meat conversion is much more efficient during the summer and early fall, since warm-blooded animals aren’t burning calories to keep warm.  Which means that fresh meat is going to be less available and more expensive through the winter and early spring months, until the animals have had a chance to graze again and put on some of that weight they lost during the lean time.

    What about chicken?  Chicken was also a food for special occasions before factory farming made chicken the cheapest meat.  Chickens were mostly for egg production.  Sure, if you wanted more laying chickens and let your hen sit on her eggs to hatch them, half of the offspring would be males, so you might as well raise those for food and eat them while young and tender.  But once your female chickens got too old to lay eggs, they were too tough for roasting.  That’s why a mature female chicken is referred to as a stewing hen.  If you remember later verses of the song “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” (believed to have been written during the late 1800s), one line goes, “We will all have chicken and dumplings when she comes”.  Chicken stew, in other words.  (Although in the song, it isn’t a stewing hen, but “the old red rooster” who gets the axe.)

    Stew is common in traditional cuisines around the world.  Pot-au-feu in France, cozido in Portugal, Moroccan tagine, Mexican pozole, Hungarian goulash, Persian khoresh (I made a very good one with beef and okra recently, from this excellent cookbook), South Indian and Sri Lankan sambars.  You could argue that most South Asian and Southeast Asian curries are basically stews:  meat and/or vegetables cooked in liquid until everything is tender.  Stew makes sense if you don’t have a lot of fancy kitchen equipment.  Put everything in a pot with some liquid; cook it for a long time.  And humans have been making clay pots for 20,000 years or more.

    I don’t think critics are entirely wrong to complain about all the stew eaten in fantasy novels.  Look at the Don Quixote example.  At the end of the scene, the innkeeper doesn’t say, “What I have is a big pot of stew”, he describes what went into the stew.  If you write that your characters were served stew and leave it at that, you’re missing a perfect worldbuilding opportunity.  We learn a lot about the kind of food available in inns in 16th century Spain from the description of the stew Sancho Panza is offered–cheap cuts of meat (including bacon, which we know is both salted and smoked), along with chickpeas (a staple locally-grown legume that can be dried and stored through the winter) and onions (a local vegetable that also stores well).  If you’re writing a story set in a terrain and climate that isn’t like Spain, your characters might eat stews with different ingredients.  Maybe dried peas, in a colder climate (remember the song about “pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot nine days old”?).  The meat might be salted beef instead of bacon, or salted fish if the inn is near a coast or river (or if the majority of the population abstain from meat for religious reasons multiple days each week but are allowed to eat fish, as was the case for most of Europe during the Middle Ages, when salt cod was traded pretty far inland to give people something to eat on fast days).  The stew might even include fresh fish or seafood if you’re next to a large body of water.  But fresh fish is even more perishable than fresh meat, so you won’t see it even a day’s journey away.  Remember that meat used to be a lot more expensive.  Most people’s diets (among agricultural societies) consisted mostly of grains and legumes, with a bit of meat for flavor when they could afford it.  So a legume stew with a bit of meat is probably more likely than meat and vegetables.  (And vegetables are seasonal, when you can’t ship everything from California year-round in refrigerated trucks.  Make sure that whatever vegetable your characters find in the stew would actually be available locally in that climate at that time of year.)  Think about what access to spices your imaginary country might have.  Caraway, cumin, coriander, and dill all grow well in northern temperate and Mediterranean climates.  Pepper, cinnamon, and cloves?  Not so much.  But spices keep well once dried, and are popular trade goods.  So wealthy people might enjoy a spice outside its growing region, but ordinary folk would have to be satisfied with local flavorings.

    And of course, there are plenty of non-stew foods that don’t show up in fantasy novels nearly as often as they should, given their popularity in peasant cooking traditions around the world.  I’ll write about some of these in a future post (eggs, anyone?).  Until then, don’t be afraid to feed your characters a hearty bowl of stew!  But be sure to tell the reader what went into it.

  • 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.

  • World Fantasy 2012 Report and Crochet Update

    I think at this point I should just accept that I’m not going to get around to blogging about Readercon back in July or the World Science Fiction Convention in September.

    So … World Fantasy!  This was the first weekend in November plus a bit on either end.  Donald and I drove up to Toronto for the convention with Max Gladstone, a member of my writers group BRAWL.  (None of us remember what BRAWL stands for anymore, so don’t ask.)  It took us about 11 1/2 hours.  An hour and a half of that was us sitting in Toronto rush hour traffic, hardly moving.  We weren’t even going through the city, we were driving on a highway around the perimeter, but the traffic was still insane.  Much worse than anything I’ve ever seen in Boston.  Although I’ve never commuted regularly in Boston via car.  Apparently that time there was an afternoon snowstorm here and the plows couldn’t clear the highways fast enough because of all the traffic and people were stuck on the road for 4 hours and ran out of gas, that was pretty bad.

    The convention was at the Sheraton Parkway Toronto North, which isn’t really in Toronto but in Richmond Hill, half an hour away (without traffic), because it’s cheaper out there.  We stayed at the adjoining Best Western, because it was even cheaper but still connected to the Sheraton so we didn’t have to go outside in the cold to get to the convention happenings.  I definitely had the sense that we were in the budget hotel.  The lights in our bathroom flickered for several seconds whenever I turned them on, and the decor seemed chosen with the aim of convincing the hotel guests that they should have stayed at the Sheraton.  Or maybe it was supposed to make us feel virtuous, reminding us how much we were saving.  Everything was clean and comfortable, though, and you could charge meals in the restaurant at the Sheraton to your Best Western room.

    Here’s a list of the panels I attended:

    Faith and Fantasy
    My friend Matt Kressel was supposed to be on this panel, but he was delayed getting out of New York due to the aftermath of the storm and his original flight being cancelled. I’m still glad I went, as it turned out to be my favorite panel of the con. I hope it’s not just because two of the five panelists were Christians, like me, but honestly, most of the various faith and speculative fiction panels I’ve attended at past cons didn’t have any panelists who self-identified as Christian. (The other three panelists here identified themselves as agnostic.) The panel was ostensibly about how the religious beliefs of writers “inform their treatment of supernatural matters”. But the panelists also touched some on how people’s religious beliefs inform their responses to fantasy fiction and gaming, such as the silly (IMO) paranoia that many Christians used to have about Dungeons & Dragons. “Any kid who developed an interest in the occult through playing D&D would have been quickly disappointed the first time they tried casting a spell. ‘I rolled a 2d6 and nothing happened!’” And it was one of the agnostic panelists who complained about the common fantasy trope of the evil patriarchal religious people oppressing the good, peaceful, matriarchal people who all live in harmony with nature and have completely safe and reliable birth control based on drinking herbal teas. Or secondary world fantasy with pre-Industrial technology where no one is particularly religious at all, which the aforementioned agnostic panelist, who has a background as a historian, doesn’t find very believable.

    The discussion of faith informing fiction probably did have kind of a Christian slant, so it’s really too bad that Matt, who’s Jewish, couldn’t make it, as he might have helped broaden the discussion. It was still a good, entertaining panel.

    They Call Me the Wanderer
    My friend Rajan Khanna was on this panel. They talked about the wanderer archetype in fiction, distinguing it from the traveler archetype. A wanderer was defined as someone who either doesn’t have a home or can’t get to it, whereas a traveler is a character who’s temporarily away from their home. So, Odysseus would be a wanderer, because the gods are preventing him from returning home. I can’t remember whether Gandalf is supposed to be a wanderer or a traveler.

    Oh Brave New (E-Publishing) World
    Publishing is changing faster than anyone can keep up. Earlier this year, I attended a panel, I think it was at Arisia, where most of the panelists pretty much agreed that self-publishing was the dumbest thing anyone could ever conceive of doing, and if your first self-published novel isn’t a success no traditional publisher will ever consider working with you. But it’s getting harder to pretend that initially self-published authors aren’t getting picked up by major houses. Or that more people aren’t experimenting with self-publishing in some way. No one on this panel was overtly negative about self-publishing, they just encouraged authors considering it to do a professional job and hire people to do the parts of publishing that they aren’t good at (such as cover design, for most authors).

    The panel wasn’t just about self-publishing. Panelists talked about how, at small presses, ebooks are outselling print books 10 to 1, but it’s still important to make a professional-looking print book so that you look like a legitimate publishing house. And small presses were suggested as a more author-friendly alternative to the big New York publishers, one where the author doesn’t have to do all the work and front all the money (any of the money, for that matter; if you want to self-publish and do a good job, it behooves you to hire people for cover design and copyediting, but if a publisher ever asks for upront money to publish your novel, you should run as fast as you can in the opposite direction).

    The Real World in Fantastic Fiction
    Donald and I were on this panel, so of course it was good. Actually, I can’t judge whether it was good or bad. I wasn’t as nervous as I was on my first panel at last year’s World Fantasy, and I felt like maybe I actually knew what I was talking about. But I think I probably talked more than my fair share, unfortunately. Donald and I met someone later at a party at the convention who said she really liked the panel, so that’s encouraging. I wondered if maybe we (all the people on the panel, not just Donald and I) sounded a little too much like we considered ourselves experts trying to give advice to the audience members on how to do good worldbuilding. I know that I certainly don’t consider myself an expert on worldbuilding, even though I’m fascinated by the subject. Most of my worldbuilding effort goes towards trying to cover up or explain away things about my fictional worlds that I made up a long time ago and have now realized don’t make any sense. I’m hoping that if I avoid mixing Old World and New World flora and fauna in the same imaginary setting, people won’t notice that my imaginary country is sort of rectangular looking with unusually straight rivers. I’ll wow them with impressive facts about ancient Roman cooking so they don’t ask me about the plate tectonics of my world.

    Diversity and Difference in YA Fantasy
    My friend Eugene Myers was on this panel. I don’t actually read much YA fantasy (though I probably should, so I can recommend books to my nieces and nephews as they get older). But much of the discussion was relevant to writing adult fantasy as well. I know that when I’m starting a new story, it’s easy for me to default to choosing characters that are like me (white, straight, female), and it’s good to try to think more broadly about the protagonists I choose. One aspect of diversity that I don’t think the panelists mentioned was religious diversity, and that’s something I’d like to see more of in fiction and hear more discussion about.

    I also went to hear Max Gladstone from my writers group read from his new book Three Parts Dead, and he didn’t just read exactly the same parts he’d read at the Harvard Book Store reading I attended a month before, so it didn’t feel like I was only there for moral support. I’m very much looking forward to reading the novel, but right now I’m still trying to finish Don Quixote, and I really should read the Imaginarium anthology that has my story in it…. Too many books, too little time. I went to the SF Canada business meeting, too. It wasn’t very business-y, which I consider a good thing. Mostly cake and champagne, and chatting with people.

    As always, at a convention, I got to have a lot of great conversations with a lot of interesting people. I hung out with members of the NYC writers group Altered Fluid–Rajan Khanna, Matthew Kressel, Mercurio D. Rivera, Eugene Myers, and Alaya Dawn Johnson. Ken Schneyer, one of Donald’s and my co-panelists, turned out to be very friendly and interesting. I also talked with Scott Andrews (the editor of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, a really cool–and free!–online fantasy magazine that you should absolutely check out if you like fantasy stories set in imaginary worlds), Ted Chiang, Tina Connolly, Neile Graham and Leslie Howle from Clarion West, Liz Argall, Robert Runte, Colleen Anderson, Al Bogdan, and many, many others.

    While at the convention, I went to the worst Chinese restaurant I’ve ever eaten at in a large North American city.  The caveats are important because (a) I grew up in rural Nova Scotia, and if I’d eaten this meal in, say, Truro, I wouldn’t feel so betrayed, and (b) the worst Chinese restaurant I’ve ever eaten at was actually in Beijing, but that’s another story.  The bok choy was okay, if unremarkable and oily, but the “Kung Bo beef” consisted of beef, green peppers, onions and almonds in generic brown sauce.  No chili peppers, no Szechuan pepper.  Donald is really tired of hearing me complain about this meal, but I’m still indignant.  The restaurant, Golden Hoy, was listed in the World Fantasy Convention restaurant guide as “the best Chinese & Szechuan foods in Richmond Hill”.  It was a 15-minute drive from the hotel, and the hotel was across the street from a Chinese shopping mall and surrounded on all sides by Chinese restaurants.  So I figured this restaurant must be good, if it was so inconvenient and they recommended it anyway!  Moral of the story:  never trust a science fiction convention’s restaurant recommendations.  After we got back to the hotel, we saw that Golden Hoy had a 2-star rating on Yelp.

    Other restaurant meals during the trip were very good.  We tried two of the Chinese places near the hotel, one large place with an extensive menu including sushi and dim sum (yes, I know sushi isn’t Chinese), and one small dumpling place.  Max, who has lived in China, said the dumplings were the best he’s had in North America.  Donald and I went to the dumpling place with him and Tina Connolly, and we all just let him order for us, since he knows dumplings and speaks Chinese.  We went to the other Chinese place with Ken Schneyer, and two other cool people named Christian and Tiffany, whose last names I don’t remember.

    Donald and I also went to a good Japanese place within walking distance of the hotel.  Donald had steak, which he said was good but rarer than he’d expected (he ordered medium rare, and there wasn’t anything medium about it), and it came with rice and miso soup.  I had an assortment of smaller things:  grilled skewers of chicken and leek, beef tongue, and gingko nuts; and some sushi and sashimi.  I thought the restaurant was better than most if not all of the Japanese places I’ve been to in Boston.

    The hotel restaurant at the Sheraton had decent food.  The first night we were there, I had a steak with roasted potatoes, mushrooms and green beans, and Donald had ribs.  The steak was good, and they let me substitute the roasted potatoes for the mashed on the menu.  But they said the steak came with wild mushrooms, and while I eventually found a couple of mushrooms in the mix that weren’t either white button or crimini, they were few and far between.  Another day I had the seafood chowder, which had very fresh seafood that wasn’t at all overcooked, but the base was a bit lackluster.  Not terrible, just not very exciting.  The breakfast buffet was one of the best I’ve seen at these sorts of hotels.  They had all the usual fried potatoes, bacon, sausages, eggs, etc., with an omelet bar and an adjoining stand where someone could make you a fresh waffle.  But they also had broiled tomatoes, tofu, sauteed mushrooms, and congee available in the hot dishes section, and a nice selection of smoked fish and cold cuts, and more variety of fresh fruit than you usually see (plums!  mandarin oranges!).  And their coffee was good.  My one breakfast annoyance was that when I ordered off the menu instead of getting the buffet, I ordered something described as smoked salmon with bagel chips, daikon, sprouts, and Greek yogurt.  What I got instead was smoked salmon on bagel chips, sliced tomato, a big pile of chopped hardboiled egg, and a small bowl of vanilla yogurt with no spoon.  When I pointed out that what I got didn’t match the menu description, the wait staff acted like I was being difficult and tried to tell me that this was exactly what the menu had promised.  Which makes me wonder if I somehow had an old, outdated version of the menu?  Anyway, when I explained that I hate eggs and wouldn’t have ordered this if the menu had warned me about the eggs, they grudgingly took it back into the kitchen and then brought me what they pretended was a new plate.  But really, they’d just scraped the eggs off, because I could still see bits of yolk sticking to the salmon and tomatoes.

    The bar wasn’t that great.  They did have Rickards Red on tap, a good, reliable Canadian beer.  But their “cocktail list” was all vodka cocktails with melon liqueur and crap like that.  And they didn’t have enough staff working, so it took forever to get a drink.  One night I just gave up.  That same night, a lot of other people were sneaking their own whiskey into the bar and drinking it at the tables, and I think they would have happily ordered from the bar instead, but they didn’t have the patience to wait 45 minutes and stand at the end of the bar next to the cash register that whole time.  It wasn’t at all the fault of the bar staff.  They were wonderful and friendly, and doing all they could (with harried, desperate looks on their faces).  Entirely the fault of whomever decided how many people to have working at the bar during a convention of several hundred people.  Fantasy writers aren’t quite the lushes that chemists are, but we do like to drink.

    I’m sure that what you really want to hear about is my latest crochet project.  I started a green scarf at Readercon and finished it during a visit with my parents in Nova Scotia.

    Here’s a close-up, so you can see the pretty scalloped border.

    A picture of me wearing it.

    My, what frizzy hair I have. Note the intent look of concentration as I try to hold my iPhone just right.

    The scarf still needs to be blocked and the ends trimmed and woven in. Blocking is where you wash the item and let it dry flat. This will make it less “curly”.  Although double crochet, the stitch I used for this scarf, makes fabric that isn’t as curly and twisty as single crochet, which I used for my last scarf.  I’m not entirely happy with this one.  It’s skinnier than it should be.  This is because I’m a very uptight person, and tend to hold the hook and yarn with a much firmer grasp than I should, which makes my stitches too short.  Theoretically, you’re supposed to switch to a larger hook until you can achieve the stitch length and height that the pattern calls for.  But, even if I use a larger hook and get the length of the stitches right, they’re still too short.  My sister, a much more experienced crocheter, said that she has the same problem.  She told me just to add extra rows.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have the chance to ask her about this until I’d finished the skinny green scarf.

    My latest project has been a black shawl. I started that during the Nova Scotia visit, continuing at Worldcon, a visit to Donald’s parents, and World Fantasy. It’s almost finished now. I just need to add pompom ties to the front.

    The picture is blurry, isn’t it? I was too lazy to get my camera out, and the iPhone camera isn’t as good. Here’s a better picture, of me wearing the shawl.

    I had to throw out most of the work I did at Worldcon on this shawl. It’s a good thing I bought four skeins of yarn instead of the three called for by the pattern, because it’s a largely mohair blend, and the yarn strands stick together, so it’s hard to pick apart your work if you’ve made a mistake. I was following my sister’s suggestion of adding extra rows, but there are two rows in the shawl where you need to add a certain number of extra stitches to expand the width gradually so it fits over your shoulders. Because I’m so uptight, I needed to make 3 rows of double crochet for every 2 rows in the pattern. But I initially made the mistake of expanding all 3 rows instead of just 2, and instead of a nice flare, I got a ruffle. Fortunately, I was starting at the neckline and hadn’t gone too far. I re-did it, and now it looks fine.

    I should also mention as part of this post (and this is the very last thing, I promise!) that we stopped at Niagara Falls on the drive back to Boston, because neither Donald nor I, nor our passenger Max, had ever been.

    It’s hard to convey how impressive the Falls actually are just from still photographs.

    Niagara Falls used to be Canada’s top honeymoon destination, so I feel I should include a romantic shot of me and Donald. It may not have ever been a popular destination in early November during snow flurries, which is when we visited.

    And that’s it! Join me again this winter, when I hope to report on my experiences at Arisia and Boskone, and on my next crochet project, a flower scarf.

  • 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.

  • Seriously, Mollie Katzen?

    So, yesterday I made Lasagna al Pesto from Mollie Katzen’s cookbook The New Enchanted Broccoli Forest.  (The “new” part means it’s a re-issue of the original Enchanted Broccoli Forest, not that it’s about an enchanted broccoli forest only recently discovered.)  One step calls for finely mincing a pound of raw spinach.  I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a pound of raw spinach on a cutting board, unconfined by the plastic bag it came in.  It’s a lot.  I had to work on half a pound at a time, since my cutting board wasn’t large enough to accomodate it all.  And I think I gave up somewhere around “finely chopped”, which consists of significantly larger pieces than “minced”.

    Is this small enough?

    Even that took a long time. 15 or 20 minutes of chopping, easily, alternating between chef’s knife and cleaver. My shoulder is still a bit stiff.

    I also made the green lasagna noodles the recipe called for from scratch, because I couldn’t find any at the grocery store. It was kind of a pain, but I’m a bit of a kitchen masochist (earlier this week, I made coconut milk from an actual coconut). I used the recipe in The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook (Beth Hensperger).  You can make a lot of stuff besides bread in a bread machine; this particular cookbook also has recipes for jam.  I thought it worked pretty well.  Rolling out the dough was a bit of a pain, as I don’t have a pasta machine and had to do it by hand.  But it was easier than I remembered from the last time I tried making homemade pasta, when I was a teenager.  I don’t know if it’s because the recipe I used this time was better, or because my arms are stronger now.

    A sheet of spinach lasagna noodle drying on the counter

    I didn’t bother cutting the pasta into lasagna strips, since I would have had to re-assemble them into sheets in the pan, anyway.  Though I did have some strips, because I didn’t realize the pasta recipe would only make enough for one batch of lasagna, so then I had to trim bits of the edges of the 3 sheets I rolled out to re-assemble into a 4th sheet in the baking dish.

    I thought the homemade pasta was good, though not quite as amazing and wonderful as I’d hoped, after all that work. I did like it better than dry noodles, but it didn’t have the light, tender texture of really good fresh pasta. It was a bit doughy. I might have rolled it out too thick, or it might just be the recipe, which called for all-purpose flour instead of semolina.

    The lasagna used up the last of my vegetable CSA produce, finally. I’d made massive amounts of pesto during the height of basil season, since we were getting an enormous bunch of fresh basil each week, and stashed it away in the freezer. This was the last container.

    I didn’t take a picture of the final lasagna, because I’d made it for a potluck we were hosting, and by the time it came out of the oven, people were already here.  Donald thought it was good, for a vegetarian dish.  Other people seemed to like it well enough, too, since there was only a little bit left over.

  • 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).

  • How to make paneer

    On Wednesday, I made cheese for the first time, and documented the process with my trusty digital camera.

    I used the paneer recipe on page 297 of Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant. You need 2 quarts of milk, 3-4 tablespoons strained lemon juice, a large pot, a large spoon to stir the milk with as it heats, cheesecloth, a colander, and something to weight the cheese with as you press it.

    First, you put the milk in a pot and heat it to a vigorous boil over high heat. Make sure to use a pretty big pot. I used a 6 quart stockpot. The milk foams a lot as it starts to boil, and if you aren’t careful, it will foam over the edge and you’ll have an awful mess to clean up. (This did not happen to me, but it did foam quite a lot, even in a 6 quart pot. I was glad I didn’t try to use a smaller pot.) Stir the milk often as it heats, so the bottom and sides don’t burn.

    Once the milk has boiled, turn off the heat and stir in the lemon juice. I used just a smidge under 3 tablespoons, because that’s what I got out of 1 lemon, after straining the squeezed juice through a tea strainer. The recipe said you might have to use an extra tablespoon, but I didn’t. It also said you might have to heat the mixture on low heat for half a minute or so to get it to curdle, but mine curdled almost immediately, once I’d mixed in the juice. What you’re looking for is that the solid part of the milk (the curds) will separate out from the liquid (the whey), first in little tiny globules, then in larger chunks. (Who can avoid thinking of Miss Muffett at a time like this?)

    After adding the lemon juice. Appetizing, huh?

    Then you pour it into a colander lined with cheesecloth. I wasn’t sure how much cheesecloth to use. The recipe said several layers. I took 3 long strips of cheesecloth that I unfolded from the piece of cardboard in the middle of the package. I used about 1 1/2 packages.

    I worried that I might have used too much cheesecloth. I'm still not sure.

    After most of the liquid has drained away, lift up the cheesecloth around the curds and pick up the whole thing like a bag. With your hands, keeping the curds inside the little cheesecloth bag, squeeze out as much liquid as you can. This is where I wondered if I had used too much cheesecloth. I felt that if I had used a little less, maybe only 2 strips instead of 3, I would have been able to squeeze out more water. I thought the texture of the finished cheese was maybe a little soft. On the other hand, I’m not sure the 2 strips would have enfolded all the cheese curd properly, and some of it might have gooped out around the edges. I guess if I try this again, I might try 2 strips, and see what happens.

    Here’s what it looks like after you’ve squeezed the water out. According to the Moosewood recipe I was using, this stage is called chenna, and is a soft cheese that is often used in Indian sweets.

    After squeezing out as much liquid as possible

    Next, keeping the cloth wrapped around the cheese, squish and/or pat it into a sort of flat block. The recipe said 5″ x 5″ or 4″ x 6″. Mine was more like 5″ x 6″, but close enough.

    Next, you put it back in the colander and put a heavy weight on top to press it into paneer cheese. I had a bit of trouble with this step, because the colander I was using was too narrow to fit in any weight that would cover the whole surface of my cheese. You want the whole cheese to be covered, or the edges won’t get pressed (they’ll probably be a bit crumbly no matter what you do). I ended up switching out the original colander for the drainer part of my salad spinner. I wasn’t quite as happy about this, because I’m not sure the drain holes are really elevated far enough off the surface below to allow the liquid being squeezed out to escape properly. But it was the best I could do. I filled a 4 quart pot with water and put that on top as the weight.

    You can see the overhang of the roof outside reflected in the water

    The recipe says to press it for 30-60 minutes, and that the longer you press it, the firmer it will be. I let it go about 70 minutes. Here’s what it looked like, after being unwrapped.

    Here's how much you get

    I rinsed out the cheesecloths under running water and hung them out to dry, planning to wash them properly this weekend when I do laundry. I didn’t want to throw them out, because I bought one of the packs at the grocery store and it was kind of expensive (at least for such a small amount of cloth).

    I hope everything I use these for doesn't taste like spoiled milk

    That’s it! I wanted to cook something with the paneer, so I cut it up into small cubes.

    It’s kind of amazing to think that this is all the cheese you get from 2 quarts of milk, isn’t it? With harder cheeses like cheddar and Parmesan, where you do a more effective job of squishing out the whey, the yield is even lower.

    Two cups of cheese cubes from two quarts of milk

    I used the paneer to make the Spiced Paneer on page 351 of Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special. Cubes of paneer sauteed in oil with cumin, cayenne, cardamom, turmeric, salt, and a bit of yogurt to help the spices stick to the cheese. It was very tasty! The paneer went into a salad for dinner that night (Spinach with Cilantro-Cashew Dressing, page 289 of the aforementioned book). I used the famous baby spinach that I had worried might have been squished under my corn, and a tomato from the 4 1/2 pound box of CSA tomatoes I received this week.

    The final product

    The paneer did crumble apart a bit as I cooked it, especially the edge pieces, and the texture was kind of soft, but it firmed up nicely in the fridge.

    I did taste the paneer before cooking it with spices, and it was very mild, but definitely tasted like cheese. I’m wondering if this might be a good substitute for the sort of cheese curds they use in Canada (and which are impossible to find here) to make poutine. Next time I have leftover gravy, I’ll have to find out!

    I was surprised by how easy it was to make the paneer. The whole process (not including the hour of pressing) took less than 45 minutes, including clean-up. And that’s 45 minutes in real time, not Rachael Ray time!

  • More CSA complaints

    Um.  Can you guys try not to put the corn on the cob on top of the baby spinach next time?  I swear, Wilson Farm has the worst grocery baggers on the planet (I’ve lost track of how many peaches, plums and nectarines they’ve ruined), and apparently the same people are putting the CSA shares into the baskets.

    We finally got a decent amount of tomatoes.  For a few weeks, we’d been getting 2 a week.  This week we got 16.  Donald is a little disappointed that we still got the same massive amount of zucchini and summer squash, though.  And lettuce is back, after a lovely 2-week lettuce hiatus.  I’m sort of disappointed that heirloom tomatoes are in full swing, and we only got the most basic, boring tomatoes they grow at Wilson Farm.  But I can sort of understand.  The heirloom ones tend to be more susceptible to splitting and cracking, especially around the stem, and once that happens they go bad pretty quickly.  If we got 16 large heirloom tomatoes, we’d have to eat nothing but for a couple of days so that they didn’t rot before we got to them.  And then we’d have no tomatoes left for the rest of the week.  Also, even basic, boring tomatoes are pretty tasty in August, when they’re locally grown (not the tasteless ones that they pick green in California and blow ethylene gas over to sort of ripen them before they put them out on the shelf in your Massachusetts grocery store).

    For dinner tonight, I made Mediterranean couscous salad (with tomatoes and zucchini, as well as other vegetables), tomato and mozzarella salad with basil, and boiled corn on the cob (with lime-cilantro butter).  Fresh local raspberries from our CSA share for dessert (even though Donald was eyeing the new cherries I’d bought; I told him we had to eat the raspberries first, though, because they’re more perishable).  Everything was yummy, though Donald opted out of the couscous salad because of the measly 1 cup of diced zucchini I’d added, and had leftover pork tenderloin with figs from last night instead.