Ursula

I'm heading to Known World Heraldic and Scribal Symposium later this month. It's an indoor, class-focused event, so I've been thinking about how to make pre-1600 clothing that conceals a modern KN-95 mask.

One option is ancient Greek garb! There's an excellent book by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones called Aphrodite's Tortoise that describes the many different styles of veils worn by Greek women (and occasionally by Greek men). You can see one example of a bronze statuette where a dancer wears a long mantle over a face-mask at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I decided to make a tegidion. The word means "little roof," and Llewellyn-Jones hypothesizes that it referred to a style of veil that could be flipped back over the head to make a pointed hat.

Turns out it works!

This weekend, I did some test cooking from the sixth-century dietary manual De observatione ciborum (Anthimus). I skipped the pennyroyal because you don't use an herb traditionally employed to induce uterine contractions unless all the potential diners are on board for that experiment, I skipped the spikenard because our probably-American stock is so old it's tasteless and true Nepali spikenard is endangered, and we were out of a couple of other odd ingredients. But I did buy a costmary plant:



This herb smells lemony and tastes bitter; you can use it fresh or dried.

One of the longest recipes in Anthimus is for a beef dish:

Beef which has been steamed can be used both roasted in a dish and also braised in a sauce, provided that, as soon as it starts to smell, you put the meat in some water. Boil it in as much fresh water as suits the size of the portion of meat; you should not have to add any more water during the boiling. When the meat is cooked, put in a casserole about half a cup of sharp vinegar, some leeks and a little pennyroyal, some celery and fennel, and let those simmer for one hour. Then add half the quantity of honey to vinegar, or as much honey as you wish for sweetness. Cook over a low heat, shaking the pot frequently with one's hands so that the sauce cooks the meat sufficiently. Then grind the following: 50 pepper corns, 2 grams each of costmary and spikenard, and 1.5 grams of cloves. Carefully grind all these spices together in an earthenware mortar with the addition of a little wine. When well ground, add them to the casserole and stir well, so that before they are taken from the heat, they may warm up and release their flavor into the sauce.

( cut for interpretations and more recipes )

comments on endings

Aster Glenn Gray, The Wolf and the Girl. ( I thought briefly... )

fiction in progress

N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky. Alabaster's journals; Hoa's comments on what you can choose about being loved.

Nghi Vo, The Empress of Salt and Fortune. The cover copy here has a lot to say about the empress and her love affairs, and very little to say about the clever cleric and their even cleverer bird, though the cleric's questions about the past form the frame story.

news

Will Oremus, What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage. Argues that the reason you can't find toilet paper in stores is that far more people are spending far more time at home, and retail toilet paper is different from the stuff sold to businesses.

SCA

Paul Buell and Eugene Anderson, A Soup for the Qan. A translation of a dietary manuscript written for a Mongol Qan, with lots of notes and historical context. The last time I had access to this book, I was in grad school and mostly cooking vegetarian food; I remember being frustrated that everything was based on mutton. These days I'm more carnivorous, so there might be more interesting recipes to try! I enjoyed the complaint that another translator had rendered as "kumquat" a word that in the context of the steppes made more sense as "acorn".

art

'No Flakes, a Flickr album of paper cutout "snowflakes" and the templates to construct them. Check out the intricate octopus snowflake or the ankylosauruses.

yhlee asked how I got into "medieval looking illustrations".

The short answer is the SCA. ( The long answer is middle school... )

Of course I signed up for the calligraphy class as soon as I could. We learned italic and uncial, using dip pens. My first official project was the phrase "I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me," from the Kipling story; it came out well except for an unfortunate ink blot.

Somewhere in there, I met vandyhall. She was a year ahead of me and missing a lot of school because of illness, so we didn't encounter each other all that often, but I admired her greatly. In high school, we became actual friends and she drew me into the SCA. I knew the SCA was an opportunity to use my calligraphy & illumination skills--indeed, as a new SCA member my ambition was to become a C&I Laurel, though I ended up getting drawn into heraldry instead.

These days, I muddle along as an intermediate SCA scribe: I'm too confident in my art and research skills to count as a beginner, but not practiced enough and not knowledgeable enough about medieval materials to be anywhere near expert.

Here are some big-picture notes on interactions between modern choices and SCA personas, as requested by sciatrix.

If you'd like to suggest a topic for me to post about in January, you can do so here. There is still a lot of January left, so I'd be happy to take more suggestions!

What is an SCA persona?

If you ask someone in the SCA about their persona, they'll usually tell you something about time, place, and maybe social class. My persona is a woman from a senatorial family in sixth-century Merovingian Gaul, glasseye's is a Breton moneyer from 1344, vandyhall's is a nomadic Magyar, and Hark's persona is some sort of Viking, to give some example personas for people who often appear in this journal.

In practice, a persona is less of a character and more of an organizing principle. If you're choosing a new name, making a nice outfit, upgrading your armor, writing a story or poem, or planning a ceremony to take on a new student, you'll likely think about what your persona might have done. Most people in the SCA don't go around speaking "in persona", though, except in a few very formal contexts. The focus tends to be on making things, rather than on acting.

People vary a lot in their dedication to persona development. At one end of the scale are people interested in full-on historical reenactment, who try to spend as much of an SCA event as possible doing things their persona might have done. At the other end you find people who haven't really thought about persona at all, or who have given up on finding commonalities among their disparate interests.

Factors that people typically consider when choosing a persona include their own family history, pre-existing historical or geographic interests, activities they enjoy within the SCA (rapier fighters often want later-period personas, for example), what they want to wear, and their friends' or families' personas. My very first SCA persona was "early Breton", for example, because I was studying French, had learned to draw Celtic knotwork, and had a group of friends whose personas were from somewhere in the British Isles. (There was an associated silly story about how the fictional father of myself and anniebellet had been murdered by guppies, that is, drowned in a pool containing them; I ought to look up the history of guppy domestication sometime.)

What drives regional variation in persona choices?

Two overarching drivers of regional variation are people's family backgrounds and the weather. In the US and Canada (and presumably in Lochac, which is the SCA kingdom encompassing Australia and New Zealand), variation due to family background generally involves patterns of immigration in more recent history: I meet more people with German or Eastern European personas in the Midwestern United States than I did when I lived in the Pacific Northwest, for example. Weather matters directly because many SCA events take place outside, and if you're choosing a persona based on what you want to wear, you're going to think about what will be comfortable in your local climate.

"Many SCA events take place outside" is a huge generalization, though, and at this point we're getting into what SCA people call "Inter-Kingdom Anthropology", that is, the discussion of the way local SCA culture varies depending on what kingdom you're in. Kingdoms are the biggest SCA administrative regions. I've lived in An Tir (the US Pacific Northwest and part of Canada), Caid (southern California and Nevada), Northshield (Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and parts of Canada again), and the Midrealm (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, most of Kentucky, and tiny bits of Iowa and Ontario).

What a normal SCA event looks like varies hugely depending on the kingdom. In An Tir, there are a few big hotel events that feel rather like science fiction conventions, but most events are weekend camping events, running from spring into September or October. It can be frustrating to be an SCA member in An Tir if you dislike camping. In Caid, there are a few camping events, but a typical event is a day in a Los Angeles-area city park: people set up in the morning, hold a tournament, socialize, and then maybe go out to dinner afterwards. Northshield is really spread out, and really cold for a lot of the year; active SCA participation in Northshield involves a ton of driving, and also a fair amount of socializing in hotels after events. The Midrealm is close to Pennsic, the SCA "war" in western Pennsylvania that draws about ten thousand people for a week or two every summer, and planning for/participating in/recovering from Pennsic drives a lot of Midrealm SCA activity.

Vikings: a case study

In 2003, I started grad school in An Tir, and glasseye moved from the Midrealm to An Tir to live with me. At that point, fourteenth-century French and German personas were a really big deal in the Midrealm. They meshed well with the Midrealm's culture, because romantic ideas about knighthood and fealty fit in well with a kingdom culture that was very focused on building fighting units and preparing for Pennsic War. Also, there was a density of merchants at Pennsic selling fourteenth-century stuff, so it was easy for someone to get started on a nice fourteenth-century persona. An Tir had lots of pirates (the Pirates of the Caribbean movies were just coming out, and weekend camping events where lots of people are drinking are highly compatible with pretending to be a pirate). But it was beginning to have lots of Vikings, as well. There were multiple factors driving adoption of Norse personas in An Tir: there are lots of people with Scandinavian heritage in that part of the world, Norse clothing is very practical for camping events where it might be rainy and cold or very warm, and the local fighting culture was focused on individual prowess in a way that played well with references to the sagas. Also, it was just starting to be possible to find detailed information about Norse material culture from stuff that Scandinavian researchers and reenactors were putting on the internet.

The huge and sustained popularity of Vikings in An Tir meant that it became easier and easier to have a Norse persona in the SCA, generally: there are lots of costuming blogs, experts in particular times and places, people who have translated resources from Swedish or Norwegian, etc. The trend started expanding to different kingdoms. Vikings were big in Northshield when I lived there, and they're a huge deal in the Midrealm now. The Midrealm Vikings are, again, focused around Pennsic: there are multiple households founded by charismatic fighters, some of whom used to have fourteenth-century personas, but now maintain warbands, emphasize ring-giving, and so on and so forth.

sporky_rat asked for, "More information on the basics of onomastics on the not-English and not-French. Like Spanish names. How does one find the general usual rules for a woman's name in Christian Spain, 1500's?"

(If you'd like to suggest a topic for me to post about in January, the collection of questions is here.)

If you want basic information about medieval name construction in a reasonably popular European language, the place to start is SENA Appendix A. ("SENA" stands for "Standards for Evaluation of Names and Armory".) There's some general information about abbreviations at the beginning of the appendix, and then tables for different languages. The tables are grouped by big geographical regions; you may have to use the search function in your browser, or scroll a bit, to find the exact culture you're interested in. Castilian Spanish is in the Iberian table.

The table has columns for different types of name structures that often show up in medieval documents: Double Given Names, Locative, Patronymic, Other relationship (such as relationships to mothers, siblings, or spouses), Descriptive/Occupational, Dictus (for "also known as" names), and Double Bynames. The final column, Order, tells you how different types of name were typically combined.

Underneath the table, there are notes. The notes may explain more complicated constructions. For example, the notes for Spanish suggest some ways to form a name based on the father's name. Usually, the notes also link to one or two articles that provide a more detailed discussion.

You can also find information on medieval names from specific cultures by going to The Medieval Names Archive or the heraldry.sca.org name articles page and following links for the culture you're interested in. However, for popular cultures there may be quite a few links to wade through. Appendix A is supposed to highlight the articles that an expert would check first.

Maintaining Appendix A is one of my jobs as the SCA's Palimpsest Herald, so if you have questions about how to use it, or are particularly pining for more detail on a specific culture, let me know!

Introduction and medieval recipe

This is my first attempt at redacting a peach strudel based on the Prince of Transylvania's Court Cookbook, a sixteenth-century Hungarian cookbook.

Here is the recipe for strudel dough:

The next are about the strudels. Make the strudel dough like this. Make fine flour from the wheat. Warm clean water for this, but it shouldn't be too hot, you should be able to put your hand in it. Add some salt and some butter, put the flour onto the table, knead it, cut out its center, pour warm water there instead. Whip three or four eggs, mix it with your hands, then wash yourself. Keep kneading it with your hands, put butter on your palms so the dough won't get stuck. Once it's done, make egg-sized slices. Put flour on the table, then put the dough onto it, make sure to put them far enough so they won't get stuck. Put butter on top, too. Paste it with feathers made from eight or ten feathers. You can make strudels and strudel cakes from this dough. You have to stuff these, but you can find that among the cakes. Have baking sheets for the strudels. If you have none, baking them won't yield the best results.

I really like the "use a baking sheet!" instruction here; it makes you think about the differences between medieval and modern technology.

As instructed, I looked among the cakes for the strudel fillings. Here is the recipe for the filling of peach cake:

Peel the peach, slice it, take out the seeds, add cinnamon and sugar, pour rose or marjoram water onto it, and if you have neither, wine will do.

I had sliced, frozen peach slices from a local farmer in the freezer, left over from Thanksgiving, so this seemed like a good recipe to try.

My recipe

First, make the filling. Measure approximately 5 cups of sliced peaches (a bit less than a 2-pound freezer pack). Mix with half a cup of sugar, a teaspoon of cinnamon, and a tablespoon of rosewater.

Melt 8 tablespoons of butter, and set aside.

Sift together 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour and a pinch of salt. Make a well in the center of the flour. Mix together 1 large egg, 1/2 cup water, and 1 tbsp melted butter, and pour into the well. Mix the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients with your fingers. When all the liquid is incorporated, knead it for about ten minutes, dipping your hands in the butter to keep the dough from sticking. Cover and let rest for 30 to 60 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Roll out the strudel dough as thinly as possible (it will be nearly translucent). Brush it with more melted butter, spread the filling over it, then roll it up. Spread more melted butter over the top. Bake on parchment paper for 35-50 minutes, until dark, golden brown.

Notes, in practice

I ended up putting the kneaded strudel dough in the fridge overnight, because we had to take Martin the cat to the emergency vet. (He's fine, but he has been prone to infections lately; I suspect he was stressed by the combination of the kitten and Thanksgiving houseguests, and he's getting older.) We have a new convection oven which I don't entirely understand yet; I actually baked the strudel at 375 on the convection setting, pulled it out, let it cool a bit, sliced it, and then decided the inner parts of the strudel were too wet and restored it to the oven for a while. Baking the sliced bits meant that delicious caramelized peach juices ran all over my parchment paper; I like this effect, but I doubt it's original.

The strudel was very good hot, but when cold the dough didn't have the crunchy/tender combination I was hoping for. I'm not sure whether that's a flaw in my technique, or a problem with the excessive resting time, or whether I just needed to brush on even more butter; I definitely had butter left over. My redaction was also fairly light on sugar, as modern tastes go; if I made this using the same maybe-underripe frozen peaches again, I might err on the sweeter side. (On the other hand, if you have truly ripe fresh peaches, you might be able to use just a couple of spoonfuls of sugar.)

I spent the afternoon doing a bit of pre-cooking for Pennsic. There's always a tradeoff, when cooking medieval food, between precisely reproducing a recipe and cooking the way medieval people actually cooked, making substitutions based on season and availability. This time, I leaned fairly hard toward the latter approach. I made a beef "hodgepodge" or stew, a greens dish, and medieval hummus; I'll freeze them all for later use.

( hodgepodge )

( greens )

( medieval hummus )

I'm out of salted lemons, now, which makes me sad. I already got someone to bring me lemons from California once this year; this time, I think I'll have to make a batch with storebought lemons.

I made honeyed dates for the baronial dessert potluck today, based on a thirteenth-century recipe from al-Baghdadi's Kitab al-Ṭabikh, as translated and collected in Medieval Arab Cookery:

Take fresh-gathered dates, and lay in the shade and air for a day; then remove the stones, and stuff with peeled almonds. For every ten raṭls of dates, take two raṭls of honey: boil over the fire with two uqiya of rose-water and half a dirham of saffron, then throw in the dates, stirring for an hour [Charles Perry's preface notes "a while" is a better translation]. Remove, and allow to cool. When cold, sprinkle with fine-ground sugar scented with musk, camphor and hyacinth. Put into glass preserving-jars, sprinkling on top some of the scented ground-sugar. Cover, until the weather is cold and chafing-dishes are brought in.

The raṭl is a unit of weight. I bought ten ounces of pitted dates and stuffed them with raw almonds. I weighed out two ounces of honey, which isn't very much (less than a quarter cup), and heated it with a tablespoon of rosewater and a few ground threads of saffron. (I should have ground the saffron and then used the rosewater to dissolve more of it, but didn't think to do so.) Once the honey mixture boiled, I added the stuffed dates and stirred for a while (definitely much less than an hour!)

I didn't have anything for musk or camphor (though I understand that in Australia they sell artificial musk-flavored Lifesavers, and I've heard of SCA people using them in recipes like these). But the footnotes said that hyacinth might mean spikenard or angelica. As it happens, we have both those things. The spikenard was ancient; I chewed on some, and it didn't taste like anything at all. I thought about running it through the spice grinder, but we've mostly been using our spice grinder for cumin lamb lately, and even after running some rice through to clean it, I thought the Szechuan pepper and cumin would overwhelm whatever flavor remained in the spikenard.

I bought the angelica powder for Persian cooking, years ago. (My sister's first husband was Persian.) I haven't used much of the angelica, since I'm not entirely sold on the flavor: it smells sharp, like amchur (mango powder) or citrus, but with an undertone like mown grass just starting to decay. I mixed an eighth of a teaspoon into a quarter-cup of sugar, and that was enough to make all of the sugar smell like angelica. I sprinkled some angelica sugar on the dates before transporting them to the event, and more after I had dished them out. I think this is a good use for angelica: it has an effect similar to a squeeze of lemon in a modern recipe, and in this quantity it's not overwhelming.

The next recipe in the book involves reconstituting dried dates using the juice of a green watermelon. This sounds like a lot of fun.

katerinfg asked for "Laurely thoughts that might be helpful to someone on the path."

Perhaps the most standard Laurel-y advice is "Do what you love and don't worry about becoming a Laurel." I hate this advice, but it's so common that it must be useful to somebody.

The most benign interpretation of the advice is "If thinking about Laurel politics is stressing you out, maybe you should try making something instead." The advantage of this re-interpretation is that it remains useful after one becomes a Laurel, when Laurel politics become more stressful, because people tell you it is your duty to care about them. The disadvantage is that a natural extrapolation is "Maybe you should try making something that has nothing to do with the SCA at all," which may lead to happiness (I've been enjoying this strategy myself, of late) but doesn't exactly increase the glory of the Society.

The least benign interpretation is "You shouldn't be interested in becoming a Laurel, only in loving art." The problem is that saying so doesn't stop people from wanting praise, acclamation, and the respect of the people around them. Instead, it just encourages people to lie about their motivations (to themselves and others). If you have never encountered someone freaking out about why they didn't win a competition while simultaneously insisting they're only in it for the love of their art, you haven't been involved with very many SCA competitions. We'd be better off creating more local norms for decorum (like, don't be a jerk if you get bad scores in an art contest), accepting that some people are ambitious, and trying to channel those ambitions toward good.

The thing that drives me up the wall about this advice personally, though, is that it implicitly assumes that "what you love" is obvious. I am someone who likes a lot of things, and whose baseline level of intellectual intensity is pretty high. But because I am someone who likes a lot of things, it's easy for me to imagine that I could be happy doing something completely different: I commit at the 65% level very fast, and at the 95% level very rarely. The things I love are actually patterns or ways of approaching things: I care about learning new things, about formal structures like grammar and mathematics, about repetitive or meditative ways of making things, about iterating toward something better. Sometimes I tell people that my Laurel is in research and languages (learning stuff and one kind of formal structure!), but really I just did enough more or less related things until enough people on the Laurel council thought it was cool.

That's my version of the standard advice: Laurels are human. Even if you're doing everything right, it will take them a while to notice. Do things you think are interesting, ask yourself whether they're medieval things, let other people know about your questions, and try not to stress too much about the timeline.