Ursula

Suggest a topic and I'll try to post about it this month? (Past instances of this tradition are tagged january meme, though I see I'm only running a week or so later than last year.)

flowersforgraves asked, "What do you look for or search by if you're looking for new things to read (i.e. are you more likely to pick up something if it's by an author you've previously read in a different genre, vs if it's a similar genre but an unfamiliar author, etc.)?"

This is a great question! I definitely read by author, and sometimes I read everything by a particular author. This can be systematic, if I really like someone's work, but sometimes I casually pick up books by the same author until it turns out I've read all of them. Sofia Samatar is a "read everything, quickly" writer for me, for instance; I initially read her novels, then her collected short stories and prose poetry, and I'm really looking forward to her new memoir.

I don't keep an official to-read list--I'd rather read whatever seems most fun to me at any given moment--but if I come across a rec or review of something that sounds intriguing, I'll add it to either a wishlist or my library ebook holds. I scroll through my wishlist when I want to read a new book but I'm not sure what book I want to read. (The wishlist I use for this purpose lives on Amazon, but all else being equal I'd rather give other people money, so once I pick a book, I often buy it from somewhere else or request it from a library.)

I do pay attention to which writers blurb which books, especially when I'm browsing in a library or bookstore. The extreme case here is Fonda Lee's Jade City: the library hardback was covered in blurbs. I inferred that it was Asian-inspired secondary-world fantasy that people who care about worldbuilding liked a lot and checked it out on that basis. When I started reading, I was startled to discover it was based on twentieth-century rather than medieval history.

Another thing I do when browsing in person is read pages out of the middle of a book to see what I make of the prose and general attitude. When I was younger I'd also read the last page of a book to check whether it was unbelievably depressing, but these days I have both more interest in tragedies and more faith in my ability to guess a book's emotional tenor from other clues. The last book I read because I'd enjoyed pages chosen from the middle of a book is Saad Z. Hossain's Djinn City, which was fascinating, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes bleak. It does end on a massive cliffhanger, but (in full disclosure) the book I flipped through physically was a sequel, so I couldn't exactly have checked.

rugessnome asked me to post about, "Your choice of ingredient that you've used in recreating historical recipes but isn't used much in modern American cooking, or is used very differently."

I've been pretty good about writing up my medieval cooking experiments in the last few years, so I'm having a hard time thinking of something that I've used recently but haven't written about. This probably means that I'm taking some odd practice for granted. But let's talk about a tiny recipe mystery involving something I don't use very often: oatmeal.

I like granola, but I've never liked oatmeal for breakfast (I wish I did, since it's compatible with a bunch of my annoying dietary constraints!) Consider, now, this anti-oatmeal recipe for "buttered worts", from Gentyll manly Cokere, c. 1500:

To make buttyrd Wortys. Take all maner of gode herbys that ye may gette pyke them washe them and hacke them and boyle them vp in fayre water and put ther to butture clarefied A grete quantite And when they be boylde enowgh salt them but let non Ote mele come ther yn And dyse brede in small gobbetts & do hit in dyshys and powre the wortes A pon and serue hit furth.

Notice the warning: "let non Ote mele come ther yn" ("Let no oatmeal come therein"). A similar recipe from a slightly earlier source has the same prohibition.

Why, you might ask yourself, are the recipe writers going out of their way to warn you not to put oatmeal in your dish of buttery greens? One answer shows up in a seventeenth-century Danish cookbook:

VI. To cook cabbage

There is no need to write much about it, every farmer’s wife knows how. And often at a farmer’s you will taste a better cabbage than in the noble’s kitchen. However this is how a cabbage is cooked: Put water and oats on the fire with a red onion or two finely chopped. Let it seethe until it is nice and smooth. Chop the cabbage finely, the finer the better it will be. When the sauce is smooth then put the cabbage into it and let it seethe until it is soft. Then put butter in: but if you want it with lard then grind the lard finely first and let it seethe with the oats.

It's unusual to see a medieval recipe for oatmeal with vegetables, because "every farmer's wife knows how"--you have to infer its ubiquity in other ways, such as the prohibitions against it. (A friend once shared a variation on the oatmeal-with-vegetables theme using steel-cut oats and bacon, and it was very good!)

While I'm browsing, here's a recipe for a snack or dessert involving a sweet oatmeal pudding on toast:

To make a cawdle of Ote meale.. TAke two handful or more of great otemeale, and beat it in a Stone Morter wel, then put it into a quart of ale, and set it on the fire, and stirre it, season it with Cloues, mace, and Suger beaten, and let it boile til it be enough, then serue it forth vpon Soppes.

And the Danish cookbook has a recipe for cherry glop on fried bread, which is more the sort of dessert I would choose:

Take cherries and put them in a colander so that they don’t touch each other. Put the colander in a warm oven so that they are well dried and then they are good prunes. These you can use this way: Take wine and water equal amounts. Seethe the cherries in it and put some sugar into it. Then fry bread in butter and let this sauce over it.

yhlee asked for a calligraphy post.

Here's something I learned from my middle-school art teacher that has come in handy for all sorts of signs and bits of art, over the years. Traditional calligraphy assumes you have a pen with an edged nib. If you want huge letters and you don't have a huge pen, you can hold two pencils together, and use those to calligraph an outline. The result (after closing off a couple of serifs) looks like this:



Then you can color in the letters however you like. In this case, I used sparkly watercolor:



Here is a less dimensional but even more sparkly image.

(You are welcome to request more topics here.)

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.

Give me a topic, and I'll post about it in January?

comments on endings

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire. There are so many things to admire about this book, and so many ways in which it could have been written especially for me. I particularly noticed the way Mahit thinks in a space-station-dweller's metaphors.

fiction in progress

Ian McDonald, Luna: Wolf Moon. I'm just at the very beginning, where one character is recovering from the previous book's bloody finale.

serialized fiction

Rivers Solomon, The Vela (part of chapter 3). I was amused that all of the characters became grumpier once Solomon started writing them. I am highly skeptical ( of their current plan... )

Interests meme from bluebaron. Comment if you'd like me to choose interests for you to write about?

calabi-yau manifolds

These are the thing I research! They're particular higher-dimensional spaces that are flat in the sense that if you were inside one you would experience no gravitational force, but are curled in on themselves in complicated ways. Here's the picture everyone uses, and here's a slice I generated using a different equation. Calabi is the Italian mathematician who conjectured that these spaces should exist. Yau (my mathematical grandfather) proved they actually do.

medieval knitting

I've done a lot of knitting based on medieval objects (or seventeenth-century patterns), over the years. It's usually in the round, and finer than a lot of modern work. Here's my current project:



Those are size 1 needles (that my friend vandyhall made out of brass rod), so it's fairly small knitting, though not nearly as tiny as the original, which is a silk relic pouch preserved in a church in Switzerland.

onomastics

This is the fancy way of saying "the study of names". What interests me about studying names is less the individual names, and more the fact that thinking about names in different times and places provides an excuse to learn about languages, culture, and the way they interact. I'm particularly nerdy about classical Greek and Roman and medieval Turkic/Turkish and Mongolian names, though I've picked up all sorts of things, over the years.

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!