ASif Forum

I am alone in the ASif Forum [sob]. Well, maybe not alone, but it has gone awful quiet.

If you want to get any questions in, you're running out of time. Tuesday midnight and Adam Browne takes over. You haven't met Adam browne? Well, drop into the Forum and talk to him. But not until Wednesday. Till then come and chat with me. There have been surprisingly few questions about the uses of history in fiction or how on earth someone as strange I me teaches writing or whether I finally used those Medieval latrines in a novel or why I kill morris dancers. Come and make my life interesting with lots and lots of questions:

http://www.asif.dreamhosters.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=145&start=75

PS If you're having trouble registering, maybe email the site admin person so she knows it's you and not spammers. A lot of spammers have been trying to register recently and have made her life chaotic.

(no subject)

More cookbooks.

I realised this morning that I have to get my floor tidy by tomorrow because this week is *such* a big week with teaching and deadlines.

Three books in this post. Each quite different. All modern. Modern by my standards, anyhow.

The first one is another of those books I love far, far too much. It's edited by Hilary Spurling and is "Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book". It was never written for publication - it was like that notebook I keep (which is temporarily mislaid, alas) with all the scrummy things my friends have taught me and some of my mother's secrets and a few children's rhymes for singing in the kitchen.

Elinor Fettiplace was a cousin to one Sir Walter Raleigh so I thought you might like one of *his* recipes on a pleasant Sunday morning. Baccy suits Sunday, somehow. I've never tried this recipe and would be very interested in reports if anyone *does* make it (yes, there is a pattern here - I'm intentionally giving recipes I haven't made).

"To make tobacca water. (by: Sr W: R:)
Take two gallons of muscadell, a pound of bought leaf Tobacco, but not english, a pound of annisseeds, shread the Tobacco small, & pound the annisseed very small, then lay them all the stiep theirin, then distill it with a soft fire, & when you distill it, put in some reasins of the Sun, & so drink it."

I like his approach to the word aniseed. Doubling everything and not worrying too much about excess letters. I would be tempted to do it myself except that I would get into so much trouble. I doubt a publisher would accept Raleigh's model as an excuse.

"Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweatmeats" comes next. Karen Hess has transcribed this and yes, it's another of those ab fab family manuscripts: Washington owned it from the mid-eighteenth century. I totally adore old family manuscripts and their recipes.

Karen Hess says in the intro that the original recipes are seventeenth century. She also calls the seventeenth century the "golden age of English cooking" but to my mind that cuisine isn't nearly as wonderful as the Medieval English. My particular biasses, I guess. The one thing that's for certain is that the modern ignominy that English cooking rests under is wrong - it has been a great cuisine and it still has elements of greatness. Sometimes one has to look a bit to find them, is all.

And now here's a recipe suitable for Spring, since blossoms have just come out in Canberra:
"To make violet cakes
Take a quarter of a pound of sugar, & put to it 2 or 3 spoonfulls of water, & boyle it to sugar againe. then take fesh gathered violets & clip the green from them, & shread them very fine. then mingle them with your sugar on the fire & give them a walme or 2. then drop them on a plate, & they are made."

(walme has something to do with making the thing bubble - I wonder if it's the last check of moisture levels?)

The last book for this entry is "The Jane Austen Cookbok" by Maggie Black and Deirdre le Faye. So many of my friends haul this one from its shelf that it's almost tempting to leave it out. Some of them are Jane Austen buffs. Some are Regency buffs. You could almost take recipes from this for the New Ceres project (watch girliejones for more about New Ceres. The 'almost', is because Martha Lloyd (whose recipes *are* the book) died in the middle of the nineteenth century. So it's mostly a bit late for either eighteenth century or Regency.

Some recipes overlap, though, and in honour of all those fun Regency romances out there (and in deference to Star Trek DS9 because if you make a large amount I would think you could call this a "Grand Negus") here is a Negus recipe.

"1 pint port wine
1 lemon
12 sugar lumps
1 pints boiling water
grated nutmeg

Pour the port into a large, heatproof jug. Rub the lemon with the sugar lumps, then squeeze the lemon juice and strain it. Mix the sugar and lemon juice with the port, and add the boiling water. Cover the jug until the liquid has cooled a bit, then serve in glasses with a scrap of grated nutmeg."

I believe nutmeg is hallucinogenic in sufficient quantities. I wonder...

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Only three more stacks of books to go away. This is the biggest pile and it's the miscellaneous one. I was going to use it to teach about cookbooks and food reference books.

First up is C Anne Wilson's "Food and Drink in Britain From the Stone Age to the 19th Century." An outstanding overview - worth getting or reading or both. Then I have Jonathan Roberts' "Cabbages and Kings. The origins of fruit and vegetables." It has many lovely pictures and describes what we know of many vegetables. It's a handy quick reference that's nice to browse. The information in it will be out of date in a few years because current research is exciting and our knowledge is changing quite rapidly. Still, handy references are good to have.

Another good book to possess is "Food in England" by Dorothy Hartley. Elizabeth Chadwick sent me this, and it's a real treasure (I send her notecards made of elephant dung and she sends me yummy books about food). It's one of the books anyone interested in English food should possess.

A more specialist volume is "Fooles and Fricassees: Food in Shakespeare's England." It's an exhibition catalogue and has pictures of everything from handwritten cookbooks (I want to see more of these edited and in print!!) to garden designs. It also contains some recipes. You need this one:
"To make Snowe-Creame.
Take a quart of Creame, and put in a little large mace, and then sett it on the fire, and lett it boyle, and then take it of[f], and pure it in a bason, and take the mace and let it stand till it bee almost cold, and then poure it into a platter, and then put in a sponefull of good Runnett, and then stirr it together, soe lett it stand till it bee cold."

From England to India. KT Achaya's "Indian Food. A Historical Companion" is not a cookbook either. It is a terrific reference book. It's a bit short (under 300 pages) but it works its way methodically through history, regions, the way different religions handle food (and I really appreciate a book about food that understands that religion affects the way we approach food and that countries can have more than one religion), medicine and a really, really good glossary. I use two glossaries - this and one I developed for myself. I need to work on my own one again some day.

The last two books to go away just now are both Medieval. Most of my Medieval stuff didn't make the sorting piles (because I use it frequently enough so I can just grab the main books as I leave to teach) but these two are both special.

The first is Maria Dembinska's "Food and Drink in Medieval Poland." It is very dated, I suspect, because much has been learned since 1963, but it's still the only reference I have for Polish food at that time (I don't read Polish, which means I am 100% reliant on translations, which is sad). I've tried a few of the recipes. I need to try more.

I have talked about "A Drizzle of Honey" before and I will no doubt talk about it again. It's the book I use whenever I want to explain reconstructing culinary traditions. I love that it doesn't divorce the people from their cooking. I hate how so many of the people who cooked suffered for their ancestry.

It's a sad book, but also a joyous one.

The sadness comes in the recognition of cultural loss. Eating was regarded by some inquisition officials as indicating a fall by converted Jews back into Judaism : it was not enough to change your beliefs - you had to change most of your everyday life as well. Eating habits and cooking practices were recorded as part of the questioning and evidence of spies.

The joy lies in the reclamation of lives and recipes from the Inquisition records. We know that Juan Sanchez Exarch was killed in 1486 for keeping the Sabbath, for eating hamin, for following Passover customs, for eating in a hut during Sukkoth, for believing in Moses more than Jesus and for washing his hands before praying. We also know that he ate a cabbage stew on Sabbath: green cabbage, olive oil, garlic, chickpeas, broth, salt, pepper, coriander and cumin simmered over a dying fire to make a good Saturday lunch. Or maybe cooked faster and eaten on Friday night?

This book reminds us of lost lives. I keep thinking "I need to use this in my fiction someday." It's too fascinating and full of stories just to sit on one of my cookbook shelves.