ursula | (no subject)

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).

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Does Miles Vorkosigan breathe monosyllables, too? I think he does.

Bwahahaha!

And hey, a birthday! Please tell me he has time to celebrate it, at least?

glasseye had his way, he'd ignore all holidays, save possibly for sleeping in. I think this year it'll stop at baklava and presents. There ARE presents. They have been sitting wrapped on a top shelf for a week.

And I didn't know you read Sheri Tepper.

I've only read a couple, since I tend to enjoy the first half, and then get frustrated when the plot turns into moral lecture.

1. baklava....there's the whole Greek vs Turkish thing too....I had a greek roomie who taught me how to make baklava. it HAS to be soaked in yummy syrup (she did hers with honey and sugar mixed, with lemon and orange zest, plus a cinnamon stick or three). turkish baklava, she'd say with a derisive sniff, is dry (ie not as much syrup ;))

she was the one who taught me to make it with a mix of almonds, pistachios and pecans since I'm allergic to walnuts :)....

2. LMB book...so did you LIKE it? :) I keep finding her non miles stuff just a bit short of the mark so far. I mean its good...better than most stuff ou thtere but I'm a hard core Sci Fi person and fantasy always seems kinda bland to me...even hers!

1. There's supposedly a Charles Perry article which theorizes that the Turks invented baklava. I'm meaning to look it up.

2. I think you'd have the same response to this one: it was fun, I was sucked in far enough to spend all evening reading it, and there were some nifty details in the setting, but a bunch of the plot depends on romance, and the characters didn't feel individual enough for the romance to be entirely satisfying.

I really love the Persian style baklava at Minoo Bakery up in Lake City. They sell it by the pound (I think it's $7/lb) and it's drenched in rosewater and it's fabulous.

Yeah, I thought about visiting the Persian grocery near there to buy pistachios, but walking to the grocery store for almonds won.

I have never gotten around to making baklava, so usually just beg mousie to make it for me. She does sugar and cinnemon and some rose water. I actually prefer lots of honey though. The stuff you made sounds delightful. Hank is a big baklava fan too btw, so you should make some and bring it to yule or something. Of course if you do that, you should probabaly leave out the honey and make it vegan . ;-)

I could leave out the honey, but my mind rebels at leaving out the butter. Some other time . . . (There's a recipe in my Persian cookbook for a "baklava cake" with a honey glaze which looks interesting, too.)