Stew!

Kristin has a brilliant post on stew, especially as it would have been eaten in a pre-industrial fantasy world.  A taste:

Obviously, no one’s going to be cooking up a pot of stew over their campfire after marching 20 miles.  But in an inn or tavern, where the proprietor and staff have been there all day?  Perfectly reasonable.  Far more reasonable than steak, in fact.  For one thing, most of the meat on a cow (or any other quadruped) isn’t tender enough to be turned into steak.  It requires long, slow cooking in some kind of liquid (also known as “stewing”).  Even more so before the advent of modern factory farming and feedlot practices.  And, before the invention of refrigeration, most of the meat people ate would have been salted, dried, and/or smoked.  Salted meat especially needs to be soaked and boiled before it’s palatable again–an excellent candidate for stew.  It doesn’t make sense to kill a large animal for fresh meat unless there are enough people around to eat it before it spoils.  So you might do this for a wedding or other special occasion, but the suggestion that a typical inn serving ordinary travelers should specialize in steak instead of stew is a bit ridiculous.

Bath

After Salisbury, we went to Bath.  There are two main tourist attractions in Bath: the old Roman Bath, built on a natural hot spring, and the Thermae Bath Spa, that also draws from the hot spring.  There are other things as well, of course.  It's a nice, old town, with restaurants and museums.  I particularly liked this bridge:

Google Goggles tells me that this is the Pulteney Bridge.  It's lined with shops on either side. Google didn't recognize Kristin, but I think that's a good thing.

There are also some famous, and scenic, neighborhoods:

The Royal Crescent, in Bath. Also, the back of Kristin's head.

The Circus in Bath.  That's Kristin to the right.

But the baths--ancient and modern--were the main reason we went.

The ancient baths are the best preserved Roman baths in the world.  They were built on top of a natural hot spring, and thus have a very unusual Great Bath--a large pool of hot water:

The Great Bath, with tourists.  There was a roof in ancient times.  It's open to the air today.

They also have the more typical baths from the Roman era: the caldarium, which was the hottest bath and more of a sauna, though it did sometimes have a small, hot pool; the tepidarium, or warm room, which usually didn't have any water; and the frigidarium, or cold pool.

The Caldarium, or rather, the stacks of tiles that held up the floor.  Hot air ran through this area (called a hypocaust) to heat the room above.

The tepidarium, or warm room

The frigidarium, or cold pool.

We also went to the modern day Thermae Bath Spa.  We figured that this was as close as we could get to the experience of the Roman baths. There's a large warm pool, several saunas, and a warm, rooftop pool.  There was no cold pool, and to be honest, the warm pool was more characteristic of the special setup at Bath rather than the typical Roman path, and of course, everyone was wearing swimsuits, but it was the best we could do.  They didn't let us take pictures inside, so you'll have to check out the Thermae Bath Spa website to see what it looks like inside.

After Bath, Kristin and I went back to London for a day, and then on to home in Boston, where we're currently recovering from jetlag.

Salisbury

We spent Thursday through Monday in Brighton for the World Fantasy Convention. As most of that time was spent at the Con, going to panels and parties and the Dealer's room, and I neglected to take much in the way of pictures, I'll just skip to the next part of the trip: Salisbury.

One of the neatest things about our trip was the hotel we were staying in.  It was built in the 14th century, and we were staying in one of the suites in the older part of it:

The suite in Salisbury

Kristin in the hallway outside the suite

An old door, with gryphons.

The construction of the walls of the inn, underneath the white plaster.  This is, I believe, wattle and daub construction.

We went to Salisbury because we wanted to see Stonehenge and some of the other historical sites in the area. Stonehenge proved to be less exciting than I had hoped. Pretty much the only thing to do there was to walk in a circle around Stonehenge (without getting too close), and take pictures. And frankly, after you've taken a picture from every conceivable angle, there just isn't much left to do. There's a free audio guide, but the only plaques are numbers to use on your audio guide. Personally, I hate audio guides, and would rather have something to read, but as that wasn't an option, I kind of regret not taking the guide. In any case, here are some pictures from Stonehenge:

Stonehenge

Stonehenge again.

Yet more Stonehenge

The heelstone at Stonehenge.

We also went to Old Sarum. This is the original town that Salisbury grew out of, which dates back to an Iron Age hill fort, later used by the Romans and then the English kings. However, the secular authorities of the castle at Old Sarum got into a feud with the Bishop of the Cathedral in Old Sarum, and the bishop requested, and got, permission to build a new cathedral, well away from the town of Old Sarum. A new town grew up there, and as the English monarchy used Old Sarum less and less, New Sarum became Salisbury, while Old Sarum died. But, pictures:

Leading up to the location of the old castle

The view of the remains of the tower and castle from the wall

The remains of the Old Sarum cathedral.

The new Salisbury Cathedral can be seen in the distance.  It's the tallest church spire in England.

After looking at Old Sarum, we visited the Salisbury Cathedral, and saw what was built after the old Cathedral was left behind:

The view of the spire from the cathedral's courtyard.

Inside the cathedral.

Also inside the cathedral.

A model of Old Sarum, including the old cathedral, inside the Salisbury Cathedral.

Update: (11/8/2013): Added a picture of the Heelstone, which I couldn't find before.

London Holiday

Kristin and I are in the UK for the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton.  The convention starts tomorrow, and in the meantime, we've been in London doing the tourist thing.  Being who we are, this has meant not Big Ben and the Tower of London, but the Science Museum, the Classics wing of the British Museum, and Verulamium near St. Albans.

We're staying in a hotel room which is very modern, but rather small:

Kristin on her phone in the hotel room

The very narrow bathroom

All the lights in the hotel room appear to be LEDs, from the ceiling lights, to the stars overhead, and the blue highlights and the television accents:

Blue highlights and star-studded ceiling

The television has a nice glow behind it.

And, of course, there's a collection of inputs for the television, in case you want to show something through HDMI, VGA, RCA, or any other connection.

Connections for the television.  I'm using the USB to charge my phone.

I'm afraid that I didn't take any pictures at the Science Museum, which is too bad.  There was a fairly nice exhibit on steam power, with a huge, working steam engine.  I'm sure all the steampunk writers at World Fantasy would enjoy it.

Kristin and I were focused on the Roman exhibits at the British Museum.  I have more pictures than is practical of that part, but here are a few:

Cooking utensils in the ancient world

A body chain, one of the few examples of this Classical type of jewelry

Weapons!

The Portland Vase

I took a lot more pictures, of a lot of different things, mostly for reference in my writings.

We also went to Verulamium, which was one of the big Roman towns in the early years of Britain's induction to the Empire.  They had a pretty nice museum as well.  Much smaller than the British Museum, and very kid friendly with a lot of annoying multimedia presentation, but there were some interesting items, including the reconstruction of a number of rooms to try to show daily life:

Preparing food in a "middle class" kitchen

A door latch--I've been trying to figure out how exactly it worked

A hearth for preparing food

There are also a few excavation sites nearby:

Part of Verulamium's wall

What's left of the theater

A mosaic floor with a hypocaust--an underground heating system

Today, we went to see St. Paul's Cathedral.  They wouldn't let us take pictures inside, but we were able to take some outside:

The front of St. Paul's, distorted since I was using the panorama mode of my phone.

The dome

A picture from the top of the dome,  looking down on the towers in the first picture.  It required climbing a lot of stairs. 

That's all for now.  Tomorrow, we're heading for Brighton and the World Fantasy Convention.

T-shirts

For our anniversary in May, Kristin and I designed matching T-shirts.

They are now available for sale, in an array of styles and colors.

I won't ruin the joke by explaining it, but I will give a hint.

The War Against the Squirrels

My wife has been fighting the most wily and dangerous enemy of her gardening career.  She woke up with a cold on Monday morning, feeling sick and coughing. But that was a minor nuisance compared to the calamity that struck later in the day.  The squirrels had gotten into her raised bed and destroyed much of it, including most of the recently planted seeds and some of the younger plants. Kristin had been using Cayenne pepper flakes to keep the squirrels out, but apparently one of them has developed a taste for it.  She threw the closest thing at hand at it (my cell phone charger) when she saw it in her garden, but by then the damage had been done.

The damage from day two of the great squirrel war. The red is from the now ineffective Cayenne pepper.

Since then, she and the squirrels have been dueling.  She's been trying something different every day, inspired by the dark secrets found in the murky depths of the Internet, or possibly just in her cold-drug-addled brain.  She's tried throwing rocks, she's tried shooting foam discs, she's tried garlic and chicken wire and most recently, ghosts.

Spooky ghosts to frighten squirrels

She's determined to drive the squirrels away, though I worry that she'll make them so accustomed to the spicy, garlicky food and spooky ambiance that they'll never eat at a bland, regular garden again.

Update (10/5/2013): One more photo:

Ghosts from above!

Really old books

It seems like mostly I've been talking about the things I've been doing with Black Gate recently, and haven't talked about much else.  I figure it's time to change that.

Kristin has been reading Don Quixote recently, and has a nice, long post up about the book:

I mentioned that I had been reading Don Quixote, and at one point there are these women who’ve supposedly been cursed to grow beards (actually, they’re men pretending to be women as a joke on Don Quixote, but that’s beside the point).  Don Quixote’s squire Sancho Panza says, “I’ll wager they don’t have enough money to pay for somebody to shave them.”  And I realized, which I never had before, that if your fantasy world doesn’t have safety razors and good mirrors, you can’t have all the men walking around clean-shaven unless there are a lot of inexpensive barbers.

Learning things from old fiction is an especially good way to research writing historical fiction.  You can read all the books on the history and daily life of a certain time period that you can get your hands on, but none of these will give you as good a feel for what was considered the normal daily routine, and what was considered unusual and noteworthy, as reading fiction written by those living in that age.  I've recently been reading Ovid's love poems (the Amores, the Art of Love, Love's Cure, and The Art of Beauty).  Some of the advice is surprisingly modern.  For example, women are advised not to let their armpits smell or their legs bristle.  And some of it is barbaric by our standards.  The Romans, it seemed, had no concept of date rape. (Ovid's advice to men amounts to "Go for it.")  I still haven't quite gotten what I wanted from these books, though, which is a sense of the Roman attitude toward love, rather than their attitudes towards sex. Ovid's book amounts to advice for pick-up artists, though there is a sense that there were a lot of loveless marriages in Ovid's time.  I'll have to give a more full report once I finish the last couple of books.

The bottom line is that if you really want to understand a culture, you can learn a lot from its writings.

News

I have a post up at Black Gate asking for submissions of self-published books for me to review.  I discussed this idea here earlier this week, and actually implemented it at Black Gate yesterday.  So far I have a few submissions, and John O'Neill's promising to send me some of the review copies he's received at Black Gate.  The idea is to gather a lot of possible books, sort through them, and select the most promising to review.  Next week, I'll assess whether I'm receiving enough submissions to get a reasonable selection, and if not, announce it in a few different places.

Meanwhile, Kristin has a post up about World Fantasy.  This is much more detailed than my post a few weeks back, with details about each of the panels she went to.  She also has pictures of Niagara Falls and, and reviews of Richmond Hill restaurants, and probably more about crocheting than I was really interested in, but you may have better taste.

World Fantasy Convention 2012

The World Fantasy Convention 2012 has wrapped up.  It took place in Toronto, ON, which is within driving distance from Bostn, but it's a pretty long drive.  The convention was a great chance to meet people, old friends and new, and to catch up on what they're doing these days.  The publishing industry in fantasy and science fiction is smaller than most people realize.  This is both a good thing and a bad thing.  It's quite possible to go to conventions, and meet most of the important people in the industry.  But it also tends to be pretty insular, and sometimes tends to look inward rather than outward.  I like to think that we're less insular than some folks, but there's a definite danger of groupthink, especially when it comes to things like politics and religion.  Most of the folks in the industry tend to live on the east or west coast, and tend to absorb the attitudes there, which are usually secular and politically liberal.  The irony is that they then write fantasy, often set in pre-industrial societies, without fully appreciating the sort of cultural and spiritual attitudes that such societies tend to have.  That was one of the topics we discussed in our "The Real World in Fantastic Fiction" panel, which Kristin and I were panelists for.  The moderator was Ian Drury, and we also had Geoff Hart, Kenneth Schneyer, and Christopher Kovacs on the panel.  In addition to the role of religion in most societies, ancient and modern, we also discussed the importance of reading the literature of a society in order to get an idea of how it viewed itself, and of doing research in technical topics such as medicine and engineering, in order to get things straight.  For example, conking someone on the back of the head with a brick does not, usually, knock them unconscious so they revive a short time later.

Of course, I firmly believe in the importance of research.  But I'll also be quick to point out that you can get away with certain tropes (such as knocking someone out via a blow to the head), because they're well accepted.  I've used that one myself, though advisedly.  (It's tried multiple times in my story, and only works once.)  And frankly, research can be exhausting, and you can end up as far away from a usable answer as when you started.  That's why it's important to have beta readers--folks with expert knowledge whom you can show your stories to, and who will get back to you and point out those sorts of problems.  A writing critique group also helps, though it's often the case that they too lack the expertise you need.

Anyway, that's getting rather far afield, since I wanted to talk about the convention as a whole, rather than just a panel.  The bottom line is that it was fun, and I really enjoyed it.

Surviving Sandy

Here in Boston, Hurricane Sandy didn't do too much damage that we could see.  The public transportation stopped running during the second half of Monday, and there was a lot of wind and rain that evening.  But in the end, things were more or less back to normal the next day.  Just a few fallen branches.  We never even lost power at our home or work--although not everyone in the Boston area was so lucky, and I'm not sure even now whether all the power outages have been resolved.  It continued to rain on Tuesday--we had a pretty heavy thunderstorm in the evening--but overall we were pretty lucky.

New York, though, is another story.  There were floods, power outages, fires.  Sandy was everything New York feared it would be, and more.  Continue to keep them in your thoughts and prayers.

Barring any further storm impacts, Kristin and I, and our friend Max Gladstone (whose book, Three Parts Dead, has just come out--Go! Buy!), will be carpooling to Toronto for World Fantasy on Thursday.  Let us know if you'll be there.

Conditum paradoxum addendum

Kristin's finally put up her recipe for conditum paradoxum:

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, one of the things my husband Donald and I share is a fascination with the culture of ancient Rome.  Since I also love to cook, this leads inexorably to our attempts to recreate ancient Roman food and beverages.  I say “our” even though it’s usually me doing the cooking.  Donald is there for encouragement.  Such as, “We haven’t had any Roman food in a while.”  Or, “When are you going to cook some more Roman food?”  He does help with the dishes.

One ancient Roman recipe I’ve made twice now is conditum paradoxum, from Apicius, the most famous ancient Roman cookbook.  Depending on the translation, conditum paradoxum means “marvelous seasoned wine”, “novelty spiced wine”, or “spiced wine surprise”.

I just wanted to point out that I'm also there for the math.

Wedding in Louisiana

Last weekend, Kristin and I went down to Louisiana, where my sister, Rebekah, was getting married.  It was a simple, and relatively inexpensive, wedding at my parents' home in St. Francisville.  Here's a picture, so you can get an idea of what it looked like.

The wedding party.  My sister and Vance with the minister in the center.  My other sister, Sarah, on the right, and her daughter, Hope, in the white dress in front of the groom's party (she was a co-ring-bearer, since there were already three flower girls).

The minister and the bride and groom are standing just in front of the in-ground pool, which you can see in the background.  I was kind of worried about what would happen if the minister took a step back.  The wedding was short, and the food afterward was plentiful.

A zoomed out view, so you can see the tables set up.  On the right side are the porch and garage, and you can just see the Master Bedroom extension of the house poking out on the left--well, more specifically, the gutter attached to that extension.  The tables were lined up in between, and the wedding procession walked down the aisle in between.

The hummingbird feeder, and its attendant hummingbirds.  The birds were quite disappointed when it was removed for the wedding.  You could see them wandering around in confusion, looking for their meal.

The next day, Rebekah and her husband went to honeymoon in New Orleans.  My wife and mother drove them down, and spent the day there.  I stayed in St. Francisville and babysat my two nieces.  They're old enough that if you give them an iPad or Kindle Fire, they'll be nice and quiet for a good while.  I think we all had more fun this way.

Roman Dinner

On Saturday, Kristin and I hosted a Ancient Roman dinner for our friends.  We've done Roman dinners before, as Kristin has discussed in detail on her blog.  Once again, Kristin did most of the cooking, and I did most of the dishes.  Which is not to say I did none of the cooking--I prepared the hydromel (honey water) and sorted lovage seeds, for example.

Ah, lovage seeds.  Roman meals use a number of ingredients which are not easy to get in the New World.  Among them are lovage seeds.  You can buy lovage seeds in the grocery store, but these aren't really lovage seeds--they're either celery seeds or ajwan seeds, which are different plants entirely.  You can't buy food-grade real lovage seeds, but you can buy them for planting.  And if you get organic seeds, they're untreated and edible.  So we ordered some lovage seeds.  However, while they're not treated, the seeds are only 99% pure--you also get a good bit of dirt and twigs in the package.  In addition, you can't be sure that they've been stored properly as a spice should.  So Kristin was kind of reluctant to use the seeds, but I went through them and painstakingly separated a teaspoon-full of seeds from the twigs and dirt, and convinced her to use them in one dish.

Lovage is not the only hard to get Roman spice.  Rue and pennyroyal are, unfortunately, slightly poisonous herbs.  Kristin's eager to try them--after all, if the Romans could eat them, can't we?  But I insisted that we not feed poison to our friends (besides, rue is supposed to be used fresh, not as seeds, and while Kristin has gotten some seeds, she still hasn't planted them), so we substituted dandelion leaves for the rue.  And don't get me started on myrtle berries--our myrtle bush didn't bloom this year.

Still, we managed to produce a very nice three course meal.  For the appetizer, we had flatbread, olives, sheep and goat cheese (the Romans considered cows beasts of burden, not milk or meat animals), and an assortment of olives and salami (which Kristin considers to be pretty close to Roman sausages).

The real work went into this appetizing main course:

Kristin enjoying the main course.

From the bottom to the top, there's squash seasoned with real lovage (the only one we had enough real lovage seed for), pan-seared fish, Indian chapati (a reasonable approximation of Roman flatbread, we understand), highly-seasoned pork belly, and even-more-seasoned parsnips.  Kristin wasn't too happy with the parsnips, thinking they were too salty, but they turned out to be a favorite, and the only thing we ran out of.  There are also two bottles, one containing conditum paradoxum, and the other containing the hydromel which I made.

The dessert course consisted of honeyed fritters, grapes, and figs.

Most of the recipes came from Sally Grainger's Cooking Apicius (shown left), which is our favorite of the various Roman recipe books.  For one, it's the most modern, and has the best understanding of what ingredients are available to a modern kitchen.  For another, there's a lot of scholarship involved, a lot of it based on the work that went into her and her husband's new translation of Apicius (the most extensive of the Ancient Roman cookbooks).  It seems to us to be pretty accurate, and Kristin thinks it agrees very well with her research in the area.

We did use a somewhat different recipe for the conditum paradoxum, but I've discussed that in detail before.  The hydromel also came from a different source, namely Mark Grant's Roman Cookery (shown right).  The original recipe comes not from Apicius, but from Bassus's Country Matters.  It mixes one part apple juice, two parts honey, and three parts water.  In Grant's recipe, these are boiled rather than aged the way they were in Ancient Rome.  We used apple cider rather than apple juice, since the cider's closer to what the Romans would have had.  The cookbook recommends chilling and serving as an apertif, but I preferred something that could be drunk with a meal.  It was too sweet to drink straight in quantity, but we mixed the hydromel with three parts water, as we had done with the conditum paradoxum.  Unfortunately, this was still too sweet.  Kristin, who's a much better cook than I am, suggested adding some vinegar.  Adding one-and-a-half teaspoons of apple cider vinegar to a serving was just what was needed.  It tastes more of apples that way, and the acid of the vinegar prevents the sweetness from being overwhelming.  Since the Romans usually let the mixture age long enough to ferment, I figure that the result is probably pretty close to what the Romans drank.  According to my calculations, adding one-and-a-half teaspoons of apple cider vinegar to a serving results in a ratio of 1 part apple cider vinegar, 2 parts apple cider, 4 parts honey, and 6 parts water, but Kristin prefers 50% more vinegar, for a stronger acidity.  If I make it again, I'll use my proportions.  It's easier to add a little vinegar later than to take it out.

Worldcon

This past weekend, Kristin and I went to Worldcon 70.  Worldcon is one of the bigger non-profit science fiction conventions, and probably the most important.  Kristin and I usually go to the serious cons: World Fantasy, Readercon, and Boskone.  With the partial exception of Boskone (only partial, since much of the "fun" part was spun off into Arisia), these are cons focused on writing and writers, with a significant portion of those in attendance being writers, editors, agents, or publishers--and often writers hoping to meet editors and publishers and agents.  Worldcon has a lot of that too, but it also has a film festival, filking, and a masquerade (specifically, costuming).

Most importantly, though, Worldcon has the Hugos.  This is probably the most important award in fantasy and science fiction, for the best stories, films, editors, etc. of the year.  This year, my friend Ken Liu won a Hugo for his short story "The Paper Menagerie."  Ken's a great writer, and is one of the biggest names in genre fiction right now.

I spent much of my time at Worldcon attending parties, and hanging out at the Black Gate table.  John O'Neill's a great guy to hang out with, and I'm not just saying this because he's agreed to publish one of my stories.  Although that does help.  I also went to a couple of panels, but fewer than I usually do, I think.  Part of the problem is that Worldcon has so many tracks, as many as a dozen panels at the same time.  I can't possibly go to all of the ones that sound interesting, and when I already have to miss most of the ones that sound interesting at any one time, it doesn't seem such a bad thing to miss them all and instead hang out with John O'Neill, Howard Andrew Jones, Peadar O Guilin, and others.

Readercon

A week ago, Kristin and I went to Readercon.  Readercon is only the second Writer's convention that I've gone to, and the first with a genre focus.  It was also the first convention that I went to with Kristin, and where we decided to start dating three years ago.  As such, it's an important convention for us.

Readercon is a convention with a focus on the literary side of speculative fiction.  It's less fan focused that writer focused, and discusses topics such as culture, historical influences, and why we all hate paranormal romance (unless we happen to be writers of it).  It's not really a very how-to con, but it's still interesting.  The best panel we went to was on world-building and culture, and how to make them realistic.  The writers mentioned a few ideas, but there was a limit to what could be covered in an hour.

But mainly, it's a place to meet new people, especially writers and editors, and have interesting conversations.

But then, that's what most conventions are like.  Later this year, we'll be going to Worldcon and World Fantasy.

Backpacking

Kristin and I went on a three-day backpacking a couple of weekends ago.  For those of you who may be even less outdoorsy than me, backpacking is different from camping, in that it entails carrying all your supplies with you, over miles of mountain trails.  We went to NH, just north of Berlin, and hiked along the Mill Brook Trail, the Kilkenny Ridge Trail, and the Unknown Pond Trail.  In truth, it was not a particularly difficult hike, but it's probably the limit of what we're capable of, given our current physical fitness.  It had its moments, but I came away pretty badly bruised (I slipped in the mud and broke my fall on a jagged, pointy rock).

But, despite the exhausting nature of the trip, there were some beautiful views.

The view from the Roger's Ledge.

Unknown Pond

Overall, I'd do it again, but not until this bruise goes away.