Risky Regencies

Considering Culinary History

Updated on April 18, 2013 by susanna

Susanna here, rejoicing that it’s Friday at last. I’m hard-pressed to think when I’ve been more eager to see a week come to its end.

I’m currently reading Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, by Bee Wilson. It’s a fascinating look at the history not of food, but of the implements we use to cook and eat it. I’m only about a third of the way through, but I’ve already learned so much. For example, 19th century vegetables weren’t anywhere near as overcooked as you’d expect based on the long cooking times advised in early cookbooks, because cooks were advised to simmer vegetables rather than cook them at a fast boil, and also because they’d pack a lot of vegetables into a small saucepan rather than a smaller amount in a larger pot like we do today.

Consider the Fork

And here’s another fact that surprised me tremendously: You know how most people have a natural overbite, and if you don’t, your orthodontist will work to give you one? Apparently that’s a recent development in human history, and isn’t the result of a genetic change–it’s developmental, based on how we eat. When you look at older skeletons, you generally see incisors that meet edge-to-edge. The overbite starts to emerge 200-250 years ago in Europe, but 800 to 1000 years earlier in China. In both cases, the change happened first among the upper classes.

The probable explanation? Forks and chopsticks. Once people started carrying food to their mouths already bite-sized rather than tearing it apart with their teeth, their incisors started to grow in differently.

I’ve long been fascinated by culinary history, and I’m starting to incorporate it in my writing. In my July release, A Dream Defiant, my heroine is a naturally gifted cook. She’s a commoner, an ordinary English village girl following the drum in Spain with her soldier husband, and her dream for after the war ends is to take over the inn in her home village, which has a reputation for dreadful food, and turn it into a place all the travelers on the Great North Road will stop to linger over their dinners. And I have an unfinished manuscript I’m thinking of dusting off where one of the characters is a French chef I created to contrast with every fussy, melodramatic French chef ever written. The manuscript in question is a paranormal, so if you picture Anthony Bourdain, Vampire Hunter, armed with garlic and cleaver, you wouldn’t be far off.

What delicious things are you hoping to taste this weekend? I’m planning to bake cookies for the first time in ages.

Posted in Research, Writing | Tagged food, research, Susanna Fraser | 8 Replies

Horn Tooting and Evolution of a Sale

Updated on April 18, 2013 by Janet Mullany

I blogged a few months ago on a post called Where do you get your ideas? about how a story starts for me, and I’m very happy to announce that that book, now called Chained, has sold–details were thrashed out by the agent and editor while I traveled to Atlanta–a great way to start the RWA National Conference! Or rather, an almost completely different version of that book has sold.

Then, the story was called, tentatively, The Story of Miss O. I renamed it Chained as I realized the story was about the English abolitionist movement. Here are the pics I found of the hero and heroine (courtesy of Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun’s portraits of Russian aristocrats), although being my characters, they do not look nearly as cleaned-up and glamorous:

Now the editor liked the idea, she particularly liked the naughty goings-on that occurred in a carriage in chapter three, but she glommed onto something I was hoping to avoid because it involved real research, and gasp, I have a deadline of the end of the year. This year. My original story started off in England and after a while and many more naughty goings-on in a variety of locations, the action moved to a Caribbean sugar-producing island, where, um, more of the same took place, and then they sailed for home, by which time the hero/heroine are not speaking to each other. This is a two-month voyage. That’s a long, long sulk. This is not terrific plotting. It bothered me. I was afraid I’d write a book that contained something like this–Two months later, as they stepped onto English soil again… And I wasn’t really sure how it would end.

My local RWA chapter, bless their hearts, had a plotting session at one of our meetings. To a woman, they said I should have a raging mob with pitchforks and the hero performing heroic deeds to win the heroine. Um, yes, I said, but the English abolitionist movement wasn’t like that. It was housewives boycotting sugar, and earnest Quakers distributing pamplets and getting names for petitions–the Georgian equivalent of envelope-stuffing for a political campaign.

The editor–who of course zoomed in, eagle-eyed, on the terrible weakness of the original plot– told me she wanted it set on the Caribbean island, with the story beginning on the voyage out, and could I send her a couple of paragraphs on how I would rewrite it. Later that day, if possible, certainly before the weekend (this was the Wednesday of the week before National). I produced a cold sweat instead, went home, and thought about more sin in the sun and less about earnest Quakers in appalling weather. I thought about raging mobs. Raging mobs with machetes…a slave revolt. I sent an email to the editor the next day, she liked it, and she and my agent began thrashing out the stuff we writers are too timid to attempt. Less than a week later, the day before the conference started, we had a deal.

So now all I have to do is rewrite and write and go to see “Pirates of the Caribbean” because I can write it off as a legitimate business expense! Chained will be released in (probably) Sept. 2007 under the name of Jane Lockwood for NAL’s Heat line.

And now I really must write!

Posted in Risky Book Talk, Writing | Tagged Abolitionists, Jane Lockwood | 5 Replies

An excerpt with obligatory flashback

Updated on April 18, 2013 by Janet Mullany

Here’s an excerpt from something that may or may not ever be written. (Warning: there is a flashback that may injure the tenderhearted)

Time passing.

Ben spent a lot of his life watching time pass, looking interested or uninterested as they talked on about their concerns or business. He’d learned long ago that they didn’t necessarily expect an answer and sometimes not even a response, but a look of quiet concern and interest would do the trick.

And when an upward inflection indicated an agreement was necessary, the words came automatically. “Very true, my lord. Exactly so, sir. Indeed.”

And meanwhile his mind would wander where it would as his hands dealt with buttons and folds and all the niceties of milord’s dress.

Time passed. He waited for the time when his life, his real life would begin, a life that had started some twenty years ago, when first he met Marie.

He, wasting time (they’d say) or exploring (he’d say) his lordship’s library, with the buzz of a bee against the mullioned windows, the comforting rich smell of leather and beeswax, shafts of light with dust dancing like he was in church. But this was better than church, and with the added excitement of getting caught. Running his hands over the spines of leather books, daring to take one down and open it to pictures of strange lands and creatures, and row upon row of words. Or this, spinning the great globe, watching continents and seas blur into brown and blue and green, the surface smooth beneath his fingers, sunlight dancing off the golden bonds that held it in place..

Another hand, small and clean, reddened by daily immersion in soap and water, stilled the globe.

“That’s where you come from, Ben.” Pointing to a great brown mass like a pear upside down.

“No, t’aint. I come from here. I always been here.”

“No you don’t. Here. Africa. That’s what they says in the kitchen.”

He looked at their hands together on the globe, hers so pale and his dark, dark as the ink that named the continents and countries and cities and that he couldn’t read.

“I always been here,” he repeated. “I was born in this house, I was.”

“Silly,” she said and she touched his hand with one of her delicate fingers. The globe shifted at the movement.

The globe revolved again at her touch, and she moved it just a little more, and more again, halfway round the world.

“Here,” she said. “Here’s London. That’s where I was born.”

He looked at the familiar triangle of Britain. Yes, London. He could read that. You watched it on the milestones when milord and milady traveled to town with the servants and where he saw all sorts of people, strangers and foreigners and some even like himself.

“I’ll go back to London.” She tossed her head and removed her hand from the globe to take some of the weight of the folded linens she carried. “When I’m a grown woman, I shall be maid to a great lady and dress as fine as she, and eat meat three times a day.”

He darted in and kissed her rosy cheek. “And I’ll marry you.”

She shrieked and giggled and ran off, shoes slapping on the wooden floor, her fair hair tumbling out from under her linen cap. Her shoes were a little too big for her, just as her gown was a little too faded and short.

Posted in Writing | 2 Replies

Would you pull your teeth with needlenose pliers?

Updated on April 18, 2013 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

Have you ever seen the movie Topsy-Turvy? I LOVE this movie, which is a terrific behind-the-scenes look at Victorian theater life via the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. But I’m not here to talk about the music, or the costumes, or this great ‘rehearsal’ scene that revolves around the correct pronounciation of “corroborative.” I’m here to talk about another scene, where Gilbert (played by the great Jim Broadbent, who should have received an Oscar nod for this role, IMO) goes to have a diseased tooth extracted. There’s much screaming and cursing and kicking, as the dentist clamly chats away–“You know, my wife and I went to see Princess Ida, and we felt it was rather too long…”

I thought about this scene on Thursday afternoon, as I prepared to go in for my own emergency dental surgery. Luckily, I had nitrous, numbing agents, and lovely painkillers for after. But I do still hate to visit the dentist. So, I distracted myself by looking up facts about historical dentistry to share with all of you! (Just in case your next hero is going to be a dentist or something…)

Dentistry has been around as long as people have had teeth. Clay tablets from Sumeria, dated from between 5000 and 3000 BC, speculate that tooth decay was caused by the gnawings of a tiny worm. Despite this rather yucky theory, early civilzations still had surprisingly advanced dental knowledge. They even filled or extracted diseased teeth, and splinted loose teeth. Egyptian mummies have been found with teeth made of ivory, or even transplanted human teeth. And the ancient Greeks even figured out that sweet foods add to tooth decay.

In medieval England, dentistry was practiced by barbers, until the 17th century. George III had his own dentist, William Green. And in England and France, women practiced dentistry, such as a Madame Silvie, who made and fitted artifical teeth and also made snuff-boxes and tweezer cases. In 1771, John Hunter, an English anatomist and surgeon, published A Natural History of Human Teeth. In 1799, Joseph Fox was appointed dental surgeon at Guy’s Hospital.

I also found a couple of interesting letters from Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra from September 1813 (from Jane Austen’s Letters, Deirdre Le Faye, ed.), where she details a visit she made to the dentist with their nieces Lizzy, Marianne, and Fanny. The dentist, a Mr. Spence, is obliged to extract two of poor Marianne’s teeth. “When her doom was fixed,” writes Austen, “Fanny, Lizzy, and I walked into the next room, where we heard each of the two sharp hasty Screams.” In Dr. Johnson’s London, Liza Picard has an even lovelier account of how one extracted teeth: “The fearsome instruments designed to extract teeth usually wrenched them out sideways, once they had been loosened by careful hammering. Pulling perpendicularly without damaging the surrounding teeth and gums seems to have been beyond an eighteenth century dentist, even when he flexed his muscles, put the patient on the floor, and took his–the patient’s–head between his–the dentist’s–knees.”

There WERE some methods of cleaning teeth at the time. There were various powders and pastes on the market, which (much like Crest and Aquafresh today) makes great claims to brilliance and whiteness. But they were also made of things like gunpowder, lead, pitch and beeswax, which could wear away enamel. Pierre Fouchard (1676-1761, often called the “founder of modern dentistry”) recommended urine as a good cleaner. (BTW, those are some of his instruments in the pic. They look just like the pliers in my toolbox here at home). It was a common practice to scour the teeth with the end of a wooden stick, though I think this would leave splinters. And the wealthy sometimes had pretty little gold-handled brushes. There were also false teeth and even transplantation, should cleaning fail (I even came across a tale of a young and destitute Emma Hamilton, dissuaded from selling her teeth to make some money. Instead she went with a less repuatble method of fundraising, but one that preserved her looks a bit better!)

In the end, Jane Austen said she would not let Mr. Spence “look at my teeth for a shilling a tooth and double it!” Very sensible of her.

BTW, if I haven’t bored you enough here, I found an interesting (albeit rather “technical”) article in The British Dental Journal about an archaelogical dig in the 1990s concerning a church in Kent. This is the dental history of one of the unfortunate “specimens” found in the vault, a Viscount Whitworth, who died in 1825 aged 71. Now, I think I’ll go take one of those pain pills. All this thinking about teeth has made mine ache again. 🙂

Posted in Jane Austen, Regency, Research | Tagged dentistry, Regency dental care | 5 Replies

Pirates! In Action!

Updated on April 18, 2013 by megan

The heat wave that has gripped the Northeast (and the rest of the country, but I’m not there, am I, so I can’t speak for it) has forced me to take my seven year-old son to no fewer than THREE movies this week.

And the rest of Brooklyn has thought that was a good idea, too. So yesterday, instead of seeing the Ant Bully, my mom friend, her two kids, and me and my son went to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Now, I wasn’t going to take my son because it’s PG-13, and I did think he could handle this movie, but I didn’t want him making me go down that slippery slope and seeing other PG-13 movies like, say, X-Men: The Last Stand. We’ll deal with all that later, I am certain. Oh, and my son’s friend’s dad did stunt work on Pirates, so we got to see his name at the end, so that was cool.

But after the Ant Bully sold out, we had to. Plus it’s a long movie, which meant more time in the AC. And boy, was it fun. There were parts I couldn’t follow–am I a forgetful mom or was it just confusing?–but I loved the action, the plot twists and turns and, of course, the combined eye candy of Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom.

And now in romance there’s been a clamor for more pirate books. Sabrina Jeffries wrote The Pirate Lord, which I very much enjoyed (I actually love all her books), Jennifer Ashley has a few I haven’t read, Edith Layton has a pirate romance coming out in December, and a quick search on ‘pirate’ on Amazon reveals over 10 pages of pirate romance books.

Do you like pirates? Are there any recent movies that make you long to read books with a similar theme? And if you had to choose, who would it be: Johnny Depp or Orlando Bloom?

Posted in Reading, TV and Film | Tagged pirates | 11 Replies