Mi Contra Fa

Atlantia's Royal Encampment (first draft)

It's Christmas vacation!  So I finally sat down and scribbled out a rough draft of the song I said I'd write after Pennsic. Really rough - there are lines where there's a crappy rhyme and a question mark, because I know that isn't adequate, and lots of other issues too.  But that's why it's a draft.  I may, for once, also try to write a totally different draft of a different song, because I generally cling to the first thing I make when maybe I should explore some other options.

Contrary to usual habit, I am not posting my draft.  I am still trying to figure out what to do with the song in general.

It's like this - the song is about the wondrous, perfect Atlantian Royal Encampment at Pennsic 44.  Now, in actuality, Atlantian Royal was a large yellow and white-striped rental pavilion, a gate, and a few panels of sheet wall.  It was empty; their Majesties elected to camp with Their household.  Considering that Their household is probably also Their main support staff, and that probably the household didn't want to lose its traditional land if everyone camped at Royal, and that Pennsic breeds a fondness for tradition, I can see the reasoning there.  And at a very deep and personal level, I don't care a single bit what the Atlantian Royal Encampment does or does not look like.  I don't camp there.  The opinion of the Known World on the subject is entirely irrelevant to my life.

But - there are people who do.  People who felt this lack of Royal Encampment was an embarrassment of the Kingdom before the Known World.  And it was from some of these folks from whom I heard that 'there oughtta be a song about this.'  And the idea of an 'Emperor's New Clothes' sort of thing came to me, and it seemed too good not to do.

BUT is it really worth poking at Drama on a topic I don't actually care about?  I do believe that bards in the SCA should feel at liberty to use their position to offer critique on the Society, when it deserves it.  If I felt strongly about this, I'd be posting the draft.  But I don't, and I don't know if I really want to pile on to their former Majesties - I'm sure they've heard quite enough on this topic already.

 

 

KASF 2016

Responsible for: Display on Medieval Writing

As Deputy KMoAS for Writing, I'm supposed to put together a display.  Alas, writing is not an art that really displays well.  I was thinking of doing a display on ring structure (which Wikipedia tells me is properly called 'chiastic structure,' so I learned a new thing today).  Amusingly, I am seeing it called out as an artifact of oral tradition. But! It is inarguably present in various medieval writings, and it lends itself to a nice poster with pictures showing various rings.  And then I can have, uh, spirited discussions with storytelling bards about the Rule of Three.

Once again considering: Persona Pentathalon

It is late and I am tired, so I doubt I'll get done five all-new entries.  But I can potentially draw from:

• Embroidered ring pouch (Accessories, Category 2)
• Golden battle-standard (Heraldic Display, Category 7)
• Beowulf performance (Performance, Category 5) (Which I will RECORD and have on an iThing in case I get sick again like last time)
• The new book? Maybe calligraphy? (Category 1) (The book, with it cardboard boards, cardstock parchment, and chrome-tanned leather, is very peri-oid, not very suitable for Pentathalon)
• One of my poems (Category 5) done up in calligraphy? (Category 1)

I can make the 'warrior's tunic' for Morgan that I've been meaning to do (Clothing, Category 2) and/or the updated Harley Psalter bag (Accessory, Category 2, potentially with tablet-woven strap, Category 4).  I don't remember if the ring bags are gendered; they may be a women's graves thing, in which case I have to lose the ring bag if I'm doing a dudely persona entry.

Oh, haha, and I had the vague idea to get some meat swords and roast/grill some Cornish game hens like in the Bayeux Tapestry?  (Cooking, Category 4)  That cooking scene is so vague, though.  "And here some men tend a large pot containing food.  And here a man takes small pieces of embroidered lumps of food off a griddle.  And here are lumps on a table, representing food."  But wee hens would be very cute.

Last bread post for a while

Ahead of the barony meeting last night, we did bread again.  Meisterin Johanna made some wheat breads - some plain, some enriched with eggs and honey and seeds.  Very tasty!

I went the less fancy route.  I made a loaf of rye and a batch of oatcakes.

Rye Bread

I forgot the recipe I'd found online.  I wasn't so sure about all of its particulars anyway, including the 8 Tb of sugar.  I know they had honey in the Middle Ages, but I just don't see it being an addition to daily bread. (Special bread, sure.)  So what I did was:

1. Make the pseudo-barm from Jas. Townsend: packet of instant yeast, 1 Tb flour, warm water, let sit.
2. Mix in a bowl: 2 c. whole wheat flour (King Arthur's White Whole Wheat), 1 c. rye flour, 1 tsp salt.
3. Add barm, then enough water to form dough (a bit more than 1 c., all told)
4. Knead; rise an hour; punch down and knead; bake.  Bake longer, because it was a dense and wet bread.

It's coarse (the rye is stone-ground) and... well, it's a reasonably good bread to put things on, almost crackery in flavor.  It is not a bread that makes me want to eat big slices of it. But seriously, what did I expect?  It's a heavy bread made with rye flour, which even in period was considered less desirable than wheat.

I possibly did not knead it enough, based on the springiness of Johanna's properly-kneaded dough. I think maybe I should just make a bunch of modern white bread loaves to understand bread basics, and then maybe come back to weird period variations.

*shire Oatcakes

North England - Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, and others - have an oatcake tradition very different from the Scottish one I experimented with earlier.  These are soft floppy pancakes.  They are definitely griddled and also fit the description of "bread from oat flour cooked on a griddle" so I decided to try them, too. I used this recipe from My Kitchen Witch. 

1. Mix together 1.5 c. whole wheat flour and 1.5 c. "oatmeal."  Across the pond, I am getting the impression they have oat products like we have corn: flour, meal, coarse meal, etc. I used Bob's Red Mill oat flour, because I don't think porridge oats (steel cut oatmeal) is what was meant.  Pictures of the finished oatcakes don't show lumps of visible oats.
2. Mix in 2 tsp. salt and 1.5 tsp. yeast.
3. In separate bowl, combine 2 c. hot water and 2 c. cold milk to make 4 c. warm dilute milk.
4. Add to dry stuff and stir to combine. It forms a watery batter.
5. Cover with plastic wrap and put in fridge overnight.

Other recipes just let it sit out for an hour or so. I wonder if that might be better? I am not sure how well the yeast did after refrigeration.  It thickened slightly as the oats absorbed some water, but it was still a very thin batter - thinner than my pancake batter.

In the morning, I made a pair of oatcakes in a greased skillet. They seemed to cook up okay.  They stayed soft and gooshy in the middle, and I wasn't sure if that was because I undercooked them or if it was because of the soluble fiber in the oats.  They were bland, and greatly helped with some cheese and/or egg.  (They are traditionally used as a breakfast-on-the-go wrapper.)

I put the remaining batter back in the fridge until 3pm. It then sat out on the counter from 3pm until 6pm, when I made the rest of the oatcakes. The batter was barely bubbly in the bowl, although it bubbled okay when it cooked.  Johanna thought she could taste raw flour in one, so I started cooking them longer. That helped (and overall improved the taste) but also made them salty where they cooked to crispness. (And this time, I did not use salted butter to cook with!) Keeping a little bit of a gooshy center seemed to help take the edge off the salt, as Mistress Graciela pointed out when she arrived for the meeting and had a taste-test. 

I used a cold one to wrap around eggs and cheese this morning. It was fine.  It's not exactly a flavor taste sensation, much like a plain tortilla isn't.  But it inoffensively does the job it's meant to do.  Also, it would be really really easy to make over a campfire.

Video series

The Dread Orange One has suggested that, since I can't make it to University to teach, that I video record my class.  Great idea! 

Naturally, I can't do anything as simple as give the classes I already do while a recorder runs. Nooooo.  I am thinking of ways to chunk them up into smaller, discrete mini-units more suitable to the YouTube environment.  It may not be possible in all cases - and in some cases, the entire amount of pontificating may actually expand.  Rather than just hit the high points of information search (10 min of a 50 min class), I can spend 10-15 min each on keyword searches, knowing good sources, types of sources, unusual sources and so on.  Whee!

 

My Dutch oven bread is period!

Check this out, from Platina's 15th cen. cookbook, via Master Cariadoc:

"... Therefore I recommend to anyone who is a baker that he use flour from wheat meal, well ground and then passed through a fine seive to sift it; then put it in a bread pan with warm water, to which has been added salt, after the manner of the people of Ferrari in Italy. After adding the right amount of leaven, keep it in a damp place if you can and let it rise.... The bread should be well baked in an oven, and not on the same day; bread from fresh flour is most nourishing of all, and should be baked slowly."

Flour, water, salt, leavening - same as what I used.  Leave to let rise more than one day - also what I did.  Baked slowly... okay, maybe not so much. The redaction has a 350 F oven, and I think the recipe I used called for 400 or 450 F.

Jas. Towsend and Son, from whom I've bought good re-enactor goods in the past, has a food blog.  They cover no-knead 'French' breads in a post here.  Also very similar stuff! And they have a recipe for a barm substitute that could be useful in several of these recipes.

Anyhow, we're doing bread baking before the barony meeting, this time with more period recipes.  I'm hoping to get some help from our local cooking mavens, but as a backup, I'm collecting links:

Meslin bread: uses rye flour along with wheat. A good common bread.  Not sure what to make of the 8 T of sugar in it.

Manchet bread: a whiter bread (still mixes whole wheat flour with modern white flour). A higher class bread.

Medieval English bread overview: Really nice article covering the sorts of bread mentioned in the Assize of Bread and Ale.

Seems like one could do reasonable attempts at various levels of breadery by substituting more or less rye, oat or barley flour into a wheat loaf, somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the flour.

Oh, speaking of oats... I tried another oatcake today.  Took some of my Irish oats (5-min quick steel-cut oats) and tried to process them down into flour.  They didn't seem to want to become flour.  I made some mush with warm water and fried it.  I don't think the oats actually cooked - they were kind of crunchy - and I tossed the biscuit I made.  Just Googled "fried oatmeal porridge," because I wonder if that's a better way to approach it, and got this.  Definitely in the fried cornmeal mush or fried polenta family, only the oaty side instead of the corny side.  Still thinking of ordering some oat flour from Bob's Mill or something.

Alliterative poetry as mnemonic

Bit of a realization in the car today -

Among other features, Old English poetry has two things that show up sometimes:

• Enjambment is when an idea doesn't complete in a single poetic line and rolls down to the next line.  The Anglo-Saxons were fond of it, much moreso than, say, Continental folks composing in rhyming couplets. Most couplets are self-contained ("end-stopped"). 
• I don't know if this has a name, but I'll call it 'line-linked alliteration.'  In OE verse, the first OR second stressed syllable of the line MUST alliterate with the third, but everything else is up for grabs. However, sometimes the fourth and final stressed syllable is alliterated with one of the initial stresses of the next line.

I have a ten-minute chunk of Beowulf I've performed from memory, and you know - these two things are immensely useful in performance.  Lines that are both end-stopped and not line-linked can get detached in memory, sort of floating as independent, self-contained objects.  Sometimes the action helps to sort them out (enjambment at a macro, narrative level: the ship has to land before the sailors can meet the coast guard), but if I'm in the middle of one of those long, descriptive passages that's going on about elements of war-gear or something, it's really easy to forget if it's stout shields and glittering mail or glittering mail and stout shields.

It doesn't have to be both - either works as a mnemonic aid.  Either the alliteration helps disambiguate which of several possible lines comes next ('this line ended with 'high-crested helmets shining', so the next line must be the 'stout shields') or the enjambment creates a logical connection. 

That is slightly weird, since when I'm doing 'To Put the Devil into Hell,' it's the lines with enjambment that always throw me.  But that's a rhymed poem, where the mnemonic is enhanced when the end-of-line sound and the end-of-line meaning coincide.  Maybe?  Yes, I think that's it. Here, an example:

Until one day some men did come
To see where Abilech had run
Her home had burned and family died
And she was now a rich young bride
A man of power wished to wed.
They took her to that town she'd fled,
To Rustico's profound relief.
But Abilech wailed out her grief:
"However shall I serve God now?
I'll never take a wedding vow
It keeps the devil out of hell."
"Oh Abilech, you don't sound well,"
Said all the ladies of the town.
So she explained, with sigh and frown,
About her favorite holy work.
And all the ladies' ears did perk!

The first two couplets? No problem.  I start to get into trouble at the third (fled/wed) but can usually handle it - they can almost stand alone, after all.  But the next couplet, where we resolve Rustico's thoughts and open up Abilech's? It always feels so weird when I get there.  The thought is supposed to end on the rhyme!  And this doesn't! It's just all hanging there, waiting for the next couplet.  And then again, with hell/well - Abilech's words end, and the ladies of the town start talking in the middle of Abilech's couplet!  And then it switches again in town/frown.  And again, with work/perk.  I always get a little tense at this point in the performance, and it never resolves until after "ears did perk," because strong end-stopping starts again after that point.

I guess it's the difference between linking things by initial and ending sounds.

Socks, continued

I didn't fully read/comprehend the instructions on Shelagh Lewins' page.  The slanty-edged bit of the sock heel needs to go halfway up the side of the foot, not halfway around the sock.  I foolishly did three rows of nalbinding before trying it on and finding that it wasn't nearly long enough.

I tried to add in the missing length and join it to the existing work.  It... sort of worked, but the join has a hard texture to it.  And of course, it's right under the foot.  I think I should probably cut it all off and start over.

On the up side, the decreasing seemed to be going okay.  I started the second sock's heel, and that's going better.  It hasn't gotten very far, but so far, it's okay.