Ursula

This week I had an excuse to do some baking, so I made cardamom cake with cherry custard:



Brandied cherry recipe

Adapted from Leslie Mackie's Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook.

1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup brandy
1/4 cup Calvados (apple brandy)
1 tbsp. vanilla extract
2 cups pitted sour cherries (can be frozen)

Combine sugar, brandy, Calvados, and vanilla in a saucepan. Heat and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Add the cherries and cook on medium-low heat for about five minutes, or until frozen fruit is thawed. Steep for an hour.

Cherry custard

Spoon the cherries from a batch of brandied cherries into a food processor or blender. Puree. Add a 12-ounce package of silken tofu (I used soft tofu, but you could substitute firm for a more puddinglike texture). Puree to mix.

Serve with fresh berries, or use as cake filling, as described below.

The leftover brandied cherry juice is a brilliant red highly reminiscent of the cordial in Anne of Green Gables. I mixed some of it with elderflower tonic and a lot of ice to make a refreshing pink drink.

Cardamom cake

Adapted from a New York Times recipe for cardamom cream cake (link may be paywalled).

12-16 tbsp. (1 ½-2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
3 cups flour
4 egg whites
1 cup milk
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 ½ cups sugar
1 tbsp. plus 1 tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. ground cardamom (I would try 1 tsp. next time)
pinch of salt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter two round 9-inch pans and line with parchment. Sift the dry ingredients together, including the sugar. Whisk the milk, egg whites, and vanilla together. Lightly cream the butter (I used a hand-held electric mixer). Mix in the dry ingredients and about a third of the milk and egg white mixture. Blend. Add the remaining liquid in two batches, blending between each batch. Pour batter into the prepared pans and smooth the top with a spatula. Bake for 25-35 minutes or until a tester inserted in the center is clean. Cool on a wire rack before unmolding.

To assemble, place one layer on a large plate, spread with about 2/3 of the cherry custard, place the other layer on top, and spread with the remaining custard.

Aliette de Bodard's Seven of Infinities is a novella about two scholars. One is a mindship who has retired from a life of daring heists and knife-edge adventure. But the human she cares about, the virtuous woman from a poor family, has secrets too. Most scholars carry the advice and guidance of an ancestor, but Vân's muse is an artificial person, fragments of many people's memories assembled on a single chip. None of the people in Vân's new life know what she built, but her old friends, the friends caught and tried for sedition, might. If, somehow, they're still alive.

Seven of Infinities shares a setting with an earlier de Bodard novella, The Tea Master and the Detective. Both are stories about a human and a ship slowly weaving a friendship as they try to solve a mystery. In this case the ship, The Wild Orchid in Sunless Woods, is a thief--a legendarily competent thief, who struggles at the edge between competence and arrogance. Like many de Bodard romantic leads, she shifts between the shape of a human (here, in projected image, with tiny bot assistants) and something larger, with the beauty of a galaxy or a star.

Sunless Woods has promised that her meticulously planned operations will never involve murder. That's refreshing, in a story that's so aware of the layered harms of power. It's a style of intensely moral stubbornness that Vân and Sunless Woods have in common, and that pushes their shared attraction toward something larger and more permanent.

Another stubbornly moral character is Uyên, Vân's student, who plans to excel in the imperial exams and become a magistrate wielding justice. Aliette de Bodard often writes about strong-minded yet vulnerable young people. The shifting balance of authority, obligation, and affection between Uyên and Vân is particularly well drawn, and the climax of the story turns on Uyên's courage.

(Thank you to NetGalley and Subterranean Press for giving me an ARC to review!)

I read Charlie Jane Anders' new YA novel for NetGalley. It's coming out from Tor Teen next spring.

Victories Greater Than Death is about a girl named Tina who is a clone of a six-foot-tall purple-skinned alien general who was, more or less, her society's Jean-Luc Picard. She was disguised as a human and raised by an adoptive mother. But as soon as she figures out how to trigger the rescue beacon full of stars hidden just under her heart, she will fulfill her destiny.

If you're an adult who loved She-Ra or Steven Universe or Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, then this book is for you. If you know a tween who has read Harry Potter all the way through Order of the Phoenix and you want to give them an adventure story about being special and different and fighting evil that isn't racist and painfully transphobic, this is the book you're looking for.

But did I like it? Well, that's complicated.

Victories Greater Than Death is for people who have been told that their feelings are too much, who need to hear that even though their emotions are big and awkward and unwieldy and weird, there are people out there who care, who will value all of that huge powerful messiness and help them channel it toward good. But some of us have been told instead that our feelings are not enough, that we are distant or unreadable or cold, or just too practical to (ever) make a fuss. When I read a story that is actively didactic about the idea that Big Emotions Matter, I don't feel warm and cared for. I brace for impact. Because it's so, so easy for the message to slip from Big Emotions Matter to Your Emotions Don't.

So does Victories Greater Than Death hurt? Actually, no. Part of the reason is that it's clear-eyed and realistic about the way teenage bullying works, both when it's serious and when it's just low-key isolation. I particularly appreciated Tina's reminiscences about not fitting in at improv camp.

But also, Anders writes autistic-coded characters in a way that feels genuinely sympathetic. I've read multiple books recently with big diverse casts of characters and messages about acceptance where one of the characters was autistic, and most of them failed this test. If you have to repeat that the person your characters are accepting is strange and difficult and obsessed with incomprehensible boring things and fey more than twice, then guess what, "acceptance" might not mean what you think it does!

In Victories Greater Than Death, on the other hand, we learn in passing that Rachel struggles with social anxiety, gets tense in crowds and new places, and doesn't always like being touched, but the facts that are repeated every time she appears are that she is the! most! amazing! artist! and Tina's bestest friend in the universe!!!1!1 We see Rachel working hard to make strangers feel welcome, and then coping with the stress of having been "on" for too long. She gets a romance with a future pop superstar who makes musical robots. And her artistic talent is the key to the end-of-book triumph over evil.

In Victories Greater Than Death, Charlie Jane Anders seems to be writing a book for her younger self--a person who was weird and brave and needed to hear that dressing up in a pink sequined dinosaur suit is a good first step toward saving the world. I wasn't quite that girl, and the book I would design for my own younger self would be sideways from this one. But when Anders preaches acceptance for everyone, I believe she means it.

My essay Quantifying Injustice, on research into problems with policing algorithms, has now been posted. (Check out the images I found for illustrations!)

Quotes from this afternoon's game:

"By the power of Internet!"

"You have an angry machine spirit."
"Probably some snake I pissed off."

[Players try to remember whether the game has entailed combat of any sort prior to this session.]
"I killed a snake!"
"That actually required a combat roll."
"I think I used Arts and Sciences."
[...]
"Art and Science of sneaking! Camouflage and makeup and... interpretive dance."

"The spider-mech equivalent of an Escalade--Escaladl."

[Character prepares to drive a burning car into a canal.]
"This reminds me of--did you all watch Good Omens?"
"Is all of your music turning to Queen?"

"You know what they do at hospitals?"
"Treat my gunshot wound?"
"Call the cops?"

"This is a party of a cleric and three rogues. OK, a cleric, two rogues, and a bard."

Declarations of "You're not the pizza guy!" in an egret squawk: At least five.

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.

Let's pick up on the occasional Greek project, as begun here. The next clause of Procopius is:

αὕτη τὰ πρότερα μάχλον τινὰ βιώσασα βίον καὶ τὸν τρόπον ἐξερρωγυῖα

I might make that:

( She, formerly... )

Dewing translates it as:

( This woman... )

Literally, in the Greek she broke the path or destroyed the standard way of acting. Does anyone have a better English idiom for translation?

eller and I were chatting about trying to read some ancient Greek (I studied it in undergrad but am very rusty; eller has learned a bit on her own.) I'm nominating Procopius' scurrilous sixth-century Secret History, since I'm interested in late antiquity. You can find a Greek text on Perseus; I also recommend this English translation transcribed from the Loeb Classical Library edition, with its associated notes.

The nice thing about Perseus texts, if your Greek is as rusty as mine, is that you can click on every single word to bring up a list of the possible grammatical forms and a link to a dictionary entry (the standard choice here is LSJ, which stands for Liddell-Scott-Jones). You do have to know some Greek grammar words to interpret the results, though you might be able to get by with Latin grammar, a basic knowledge of the Greek alphabet, and the fact that aorist is a past tense. It's also convenient that Greek, unlike Latin, has definite articles, so you can often figure out what role a noun is playing using the definite article.

The beginning of the Secret History is full of rhetorical flourishes, so let's pick up at line 11, where the plot seems to start:

[11]. Ἦν τῷ Βελισαρίῳ γυνή, ἧς δὴ ἐν τοῖς ἔμπροσθεν λόγοις ἐμνήσθην, πάππου μὲν καὶ πατρὸς ἡνιόχων, ἔν τε Βυζαντίῳ καὶ Θεσσαλονίκῃ τὸ ἔργον τοῦτο ἐνδειξαμένων, μητρὸς δὲ τῶν τινος ἐν θυμέλῃ πεπορνευμένων.

My very rough and literal translation is:

( Belisarius had.... )

Dewing (Loeb classical library) makes it:

( Belisarius.... )

Let's chat about individual words and grammatical constructions in the comments?

thistleingrey asked me to post about "Added sweeteners in cooking," with the note, "However you prefer. (Not recs unless that's what you'd prefer; I tend not to make food be very sweet.)"

Sweeteners show up in my savory cooking in two ways: in recipes where the sweetener is integral, or when I'm trying to adjust a dish's taste. For an example of the former, consider the Pok Pok tuna salad, which is a recipe I use a lot as a template. In practice, I would use two cans of tuna and whatever crunchy vegetable I can find (often slivers of daikon and carrot--in the late fall, sometimes glasseye sings, "This is the dawning of the Age of the Daikon"!) Sometimes I double the dressing and sometimes I don't, but I always make adjustments based on the contents of my pantry; this isn't a special-shopping-trip recipe. Thus, my version of the Pok Pok tuna salad dressing actually goes:

( Combine in a small pot... )

If you analyze how this recipe works, it contains salty liquid (fish sauce), sour liquid (lime juice), intense aromatics (ginger and garlic), and something hot (chiles or sambal oelek). The brief heat mellows those ingredients very slightly, but on their own they would still be extremely aggressive: the sugar soothes your tongue enough to taste the actual flavors.

When I'm adding sugar (or honey, or mirin) that wasn't in a recipe, it's usually to address the following specific problem. When you cook something acidic, such as canned tomatoes or a sauce with vinegar, long enough, it stops tasting sour and starts tasting rich. For example, I used to make the winter and spring curries out of Fields of Greens very frequently. These include a step where you simmer tomatoes with ginger, water, and spices by themselves, to induce this specific effect: that's the kind of process you come up with if you own an outstanding restaurant and want to cook at scale and with control. But if you're cooking at home in your own kitchen and are optimizing on variables like "counter space" and "number of pots to wash later", you probably want to cook some vegetables or meat in your acidic sauce. And sometimes you just get the timing wrong, and hit a stage where the texture of whatever you're simmering is right, but the sauce still tastes sour. That's the moment you add a spoonful of sweetener and simmer it in for a couple of minutes--at a teaspoon or so of sugar, the sweetness should be nearly invisible, but the sauce will no longer be sharp.