(no subject)

[ursula]

glasseye's birthday is on Monday, so tonight I made baklava, fusing the recipes from five different cookbooks (Lebanese, Persian, Armenian, Madhur Jaffrey's Worlds of the East, and the Joy of Cooking.) ryunohi calls it The Great Honey Versus Sugar Syrup question. It looks to me as if this is a question of ethnicity, not just personal taste: I don't have a Greek cookbook, but I theorize that are two basic styles of baklava, a Greek version with walnuts, honey, and cinnamon, and a Persian style with almonds, pistachios, sugar syrup, cardamom, and a huge amount of rosewater, and everyone else interpolates between. The Illuminated Table, The Prosperous House suggests that in sixteenth-century Turkey, sugar was for the rich and honey for the poor, and perhaps the Persian style retains that theory of sugar as luxury? Or maybe they just don't want to drown out the rosewater. I went for an intermediate style: some honey (I would have used more, for glasseye's sake, but we ran out), almonds & walnuts mixed, cinnamon and cardamom together, and only a tablespoon of rosewater in the filling, as opposed to a half-cup in the syrup.

***

Yesterday I bought, and finished, the new Lois Bujold book. It would have been more satisfying if I hadn't just re-read Curse of Chalion. The romances are very similar: a wearied soldier of advanced years falls in love with a lively but practical girl of under twenty, and though one wearied soldier is thirty-five and the other fifty-five, their genetics and general level of wear make their apparent ages identical. And I was thrown once or twice by identical wordings: " '____,' he breathed" at moments of intense realization. (Does Miles Vorkosigan breathe monosyllables, too? I think he does.) I imagined the beginnings of Part III: a wearied female soldier of advanced years (almost forty!) falls in love with a lively but practical man of twenty-something, a noncombatant, possibly a potter, and angsts about the impossible age difference (when women are older, they can angst quite successfully with less than ten years' difference), until " 'Yes . . .' she breathed" and so on, and so forth.

The interesting bit to me, though, was the flora: I've wondered before what would happen if fantasy novels took a different landscape for their default-- New World, say, as opposed to vaguely-England-- and this landscape was decidedly American. It's sort of high-fantasy Pioneer, in fact, with farmers and coppery-skinned land-sensing Lakewalkers, and corn and poison ivy and racoons. In context, this may well be post-magical-apocalypse Midwest, rather than high fantasy on another world. I looked for puns in the placenames, à la Sheri Tepper, but if there were any they were too subtle for my coastal eye, and in general attitude this story feels like high fantasy, rather than the heavy-handedness of "What man has done once, he need not destroy the earth to do again" (a particularly unsubstantiated maxim, I always thought: cf. Roman Empire).