Gen Con 2019 Schedule

August 1 - 4, 2019

Once again I've been caught off-guard by Gen Con - It's only two weeks away!

Once again I will be part of the Writer’s Symposium. They've got me scheduled for a bunch of great panels and such - here's the list:

SEM19160166 - Alternate Reality Fiction:  It's fun to answer the "what ifs" of history. Panelists including Cherie Priest, Daniel Myers, Linda Robertson, and David Mack discuss how changing one detail can change everything. 08/01/2019 (Thursday), 11:00 AM, Marriott : Atlanta 

SEM19160183 - Cook Like a Dwarf, Eat Like a Halfling:  How do you write a cookbook for a culture that never existed but everyone knows? One of the authors (Daniel Myers) of "A Dwarven Cookbook" talks about the origins of the recipes in their cookbooks. 08/01/2018 (Thursday), 7:00 PM, Marriott : Marriott Bllrm 2

SEM19160224 - Medieval Foodways:  Fantasy novels are commonly set in medieval Europe, except the food which is usually wrong. Learn from Daniel Myers how medieval cuisine worked and how to create believable fictional foodways. 08/02/2018 (Friday), 7:00 PM, Marriott : Marriott Blrm 3 

SEM19160172 - Believable Fictional Languages:  Fictional worlds often include their own languages, but creating an entire language can be a daunting task. Daniel Myers discusses word generation, common pitfalls, and stealing from the real world. 08/03/2018 (Saturday), 7:00 PM, Marriott : Marriott Bllrm 3

To my surprise, the first two are listed as being sold out.  That said, if you're interested and have the time free try anyway - there are usually some no-shows. See you there!

Gen Con 2016 Schedule

Gen Con Indy 2016,  August 4 - 7

I've just heard back from Gen Con that my seminars are now active and viewable by the public, so I thought I should do a quick post about them. I'm not part of the Writer’s Symposium this year but I'll likely be in the audience for several of their panels.

For my own events for Blackspoon Press and Medieval Cookery, I've scaled it back to just two this year.

SEM1686243 – Creating Medieval Fantasy Cuisines  A subterranean culture probably wouldn't eat roast beef and an arboreal one wouldn't eat sushi. A fantasy world should have a cuisine that takes into account the resources and technology of the people that inhabit it. This seminar demonstrates how to make up a consistent, believable cuisine using a simple template.  08/04/2016 (Thursday), 8:00 PM, Crowne Plaza : Grand Central Ballroom A 

 

SEM1686244 – Fictional Languages & the Name of this Seminar  AEver have a story or game ruined simply by the choice of a name? This seminar looks at language creation in general along with the pitfalls inherent in creating names. 08/05/2016 (Friday), 8:00 PM, Crowne Plaza : Grand Central Ballroom A 

For the Fantasy cuisine seminar I'm trying something different in that I intend to create - with the help of the audience - a fully functional cuisine. That seems a bit ambitious for a two hour seminar, but I think it's doable and should at the very least be entertaining.

The Language seminar is an offshoot of the one I've done before. Bad names in fantasy and science-fiction drive me nuts, and most of the time they're pretty easily avoided.

Another Response

Last night I received another email from Crystal ceder. This one was longer (though it was still "formatted" in one big block of text) and made a number of statements that I think are worthy of discussing.  I have summarized them below:

1. She got the recipes from "an anonymous source" and was not aware they were from my MedievalCookery.com. 

2. A friend of hers sent her the recipes to put together in a book. 

3. She just visited MedievalCookery.com and found my recipes came from "multiple cookbooks" but are published under my name. 

4. I claim the recipes as being my own work. 

5. She has seen the recipes on other sites presented as the work of others. (stated twice)

6. She got "many of those recipes from a friend" 

7. She incorrectly assumed that her friend had the legal rights to the recipes. 

8. The book will be removed. (stated twice)

9. Copyright for cookbooks is complicated. 

10. Recipes aren't usually original, and are versions of other recipes or are original. 

11. She is sorry I think the recipes were taken from MedievalCookery.com. 

12. She wasn't making any money off the cookbook anyways. (stated twice)

13. Her friend may have taken the recipes from other sites. 

14. It's not worth emailing back and forth because she's resolved the issue. 

15. She didn't take the recipes from MedievalCookery.com. 

16. The issue is resolved.

First, having read through all three of her emails multiple times, I must say I'm confused about the origin of her book. Her friend, who is an anonymous source, sent her the recipes to put into a book, that Crystal would sell as her (Crystal's) favorite medieval recipes. Either Crystal has trouble organizing her thoughts or her friend is the invisible type that one makes in childhood.

Next there are the statements that suggest the recipes could have been taken from some other source. How about I provide examples of what makes me think they're from my website and let you decide.

Here is the first recipe in her book ...

... and here is a recipe from my website ...

Here is the second recipe in her book...

... and here is a recipe from my website ...

Note how the ingredients, the instructions, and the color text match up exactly. Also note the words "Emma's Day Tart" in the Ember Day Tart recipe.  Emma is my wife's name in our medieval reenactment group.

I think that's pretty clear.  For all 18 of the recipes in the book there is an exact 1-to-1 correspondence to a recipe on my website, and in all cases the wording of the ingredients, the instructions, and the color text are identical - not similar, not close, but completely the same. Whenever I had a photo to go along with a recipe, that photo is included in the book.

As an aside, here's a portion of the book's introduction ...

... and here's an answer from a Yahoo! Answers page on the question "What did Kings eat in the Medieval Ages?" ...

See the part that I circled in red?  That's the result of Yahoo! erroneously censoring the word "cock". Note that I make no claim that I wrote this text (the poster copied it from a book and noted the source at the end). I just think it's pretty funny for someone to steal an entire book intro and not clean up typos from the source.

As to Crystal's repeated claims that she's seen the recipes on other websites, and the implication that I've stolen them from other sites, there is a possibility of the former but not of the latter. I have been very careful to get permission and give credit any time MedievalCookery.com is hosting recipes written by someone else.

I have come across situations where my recipes have been posted to recipe-sharing websites. When that happens I have sent copyright violation notices to the site and had the recipe removed. Occasionally I'll receive a request to reprint a recipe, but in those cases I always require full credit and a link to the original be provided.

To be fair, there are parts of the recipes on my website that are someone else's work, and which will often show up all over the web. Those parts are the original source material I based my work upon, all of which were published hundreds of years ago and are now in the public domain. It is interesting to note though that I always identify where the source material came from - it's an important aspect of research that allows others to evaluate how closely I've re-created the medieval dish. Take a look back at those screen shots. See the part that's marked "Source:"?  Do you see the same thing in Crystal's book?

I'll be writing another blog post soon about medieval recipes, copyright, and public domain sources (this post is already way too long) that will address Crystal's statements on the subject. Maybe she will read it. Hopefully she won't copy it into a book.

Julie Smith Responds!

I just received two short emails from Crystal ceder [sic] (a.k.a. "Julie Smith" ?), and as I suspected, she doesn't seem to think she did anything wrong.

Update:  I originally posted the entire text of Crystal's emails, but after checking on the copyright laws regarding emails I decided that doing so was iffy in both legal and ethical terms. So I've replaced the content of her messages in this post with the gist of the communication.

-=-=-

Subject: no subject
From: Crystal ceder
Date: Mon, Jan 26, 2015 12:43 pm 

[Crystal stated that she received the recipes by email from "a friend" and created the medieval cookbook as a favor for her. She also seemed to feel that she was being punished unfairly. She then went on to say that my recipes would be removed from the cookbook when her account was reinstated. Note that I never asked Amazon to block her account, but only that the book be removed from their catalog. Finally, Crystal stated that I copied some of the recipes from other sources, but did not go into specifics.]

-=-=-

Subject: RE:
From: "Daniel Myers"
Date: Mon, Jan 26, 2015 1:30 pm 

Hi Crystal, 

I'm really curious which of the recipes you think aren't mine. I still
have the copy of your ebook, and the ingredients and method for every
single recipe were taken directly from my website. Please let me know
which sources you think the recipes came from as they may also be
violating my copyright. 

The fact that you did this for a friend does not make any difference.
The fact that someone emailed something to you does not make it
copyright free, and presenting the work of others as being your own is
plagiarism. 

Regards, 

Daniel Myers
MedievalCookery.com

[a list of recipes from her cookbook and my corresponding web pages followed - they can be seen in my previous post on this matter]

-=-=-

Subject: no subject
From: Crystal ceder
Date: Mon, Jan 26, 2015 12:46 pm 

[Crystal's second email took the form of a brief postscript to the first. She said she'd looked through my website and that many of my recipes were stolen from other "medieval cookbooks". Again she did not provide specifics. She then implied that I was being hypocritical for saying what she did was wrong.] 

-=-=-

Subject: RE:
From: "Daniel Myers"
Date: Mon, Jan 26, 2015 1:34 pm 

Hi again, 

I'm very surprised to hear you say that. Can you provide an example of
which recipe you think is stolen?  

What made your situation wrong was that you plagiarized by presenting
someone else's work as your own and that you violated copyright laws by
including copyrighted material without permission. 

Regards, 

Daniel Myers
MedievalCookery.com

Theft by Cut and Paste

I don't understand people.

What makes someone think that it's acceptable to take a bunch of copyrighted stuff from the internet and use it to make an e-book to sell on Amazon.com?

They have to know what they're doing is wrong, don't they?  I mean, part of the process of e-publishing involves checking a box that says you have the rights to publish the submitted material. Are they too dumb to understand the basic concept of intellectual property and copyright?

In this particular case, Royal Kitchen: medieval recipes, by julie smith consists almost entirely of recipes and images copied directly from my website.  The "author" didn't even take the time to edit the material. Cut, Paste, Published!

So here's the thing, you want to see exactly what's in this book? No problem. Here, I'll give it to you for free:

Introduction 

Blancmanger 

Ember Day Tart 

Cormarye 

Pegions Stewed 

Mawmeny 

Pety Pernauntes 

Chike endored 

Rice Lombard 

Pigge or Chiken in Sauge 

Onion and Parsley Salad 

Pynade 

Quynces or Wardones in Paast 

Applemoyse 

A Dishe of Artechokes 

Peach Tart 

To Make Pyes 

Humbles of a Deere 

Conserve of Orenges

Other than four short sentences added at the end of the intro, that's the entire book.  Hey!  I just saved you $3.99.

I won't post the link to Amazon though because it would be pointless. They tend to pull down stuff like this pretty quickly after being notified.


[Update - 1/19/2015:  I just got an email from Amazon saying that the book in question is being pulled from all of their websites. - DMM]

Gen Con 2012 Schedule

Gen Con is about three months away and I'm trying to get things ready. Unfortunately I'm not part of the Writer's Symposium panels this year, but I'm sure I'll find plenty to keep me busy. As in past years, I'm giving a two hour talk on Thursday evening.

Gen Con Indy 2012 - August 16-19

SEM1229781 - Medieval Travelling Food: The Theory and Practice of Hard Rations
Learn about what medieval soldiers and travelers ate when they were in the wilds, and see what you can do as a game master or writer to make things just that much more believable.
08/16/2012, 8:00 PM, ICC : Rm 243

Additionally, I've scheduled two events for Blackspoon Press.

SEM1229782 - How to Cook Like a Dwarf
How do you write a cookbook for a culture that never existed but everyone knows? The authors of The Dwarven Cookbook talk about the origins of the recipes in their cookbooks.
08/18/2012, 3:00 PM, Crowne Plaza : Victoria Stn A/B

SEM1229783 - Build Your Own Language
This workshop will guide you in creating your own language. With minimal materials and two hours of time, you will have the core a language suitable for adding color to a game or novel background.
08/17/2012, 8:00 PM, ICC : Rm 243

This last one is the most challenging for me to prepare. I want the participants to walk away with something usable and unique, but I don't want to delve too deeply into linguistics (after all, this isn't a college course). What's more, it's a free seminar (as are the others) so any handouts I provide will be paid for out of my own pocket. We'll see how many sign up during early registration.

On the whole, I expect this year to be a lot of fun.

The Measure of a Cook

Having recently watched the movie "Today's Special" (2009, Aasif Mandvi), I noticed a recurring theme that I've seen in a number of cooking-related films: the idea that a cook should "cook from the heart".

In the movie, the cook is repeatedly told that he over-thinks his cooking, that his work has no fire, that he needs to stop measuring, and that he should listen to his heart and gut. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that in the end, when he throws caution to the wind, his food turns out to be fantastic and the customers are happy and everything is right in the world.

The same basic theme pops up in "The Ramen Girl" (2008, Brittany Murphy).

Here the main character is told to cook from the heart, and to put her feelings into the ramen soup.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed watching both of these movies. They're both light-hearted romantic comedies that involve food - fun to watch, easy to forget afterwards. That being said, I think they reinforce a belief about cooking that is inaccurate and that can discourage novice cooks: good cooks never measure.

It may be that some good cooks don't need to measure out precise quantities of ingredients, but they are always measuring. They evaluate the smell, taste, color, texture, and consistency of a dish almost constantly while they work. They have a built-in knowledge of the size of a teaspoon of spice, a tablespoon of oil, or a cup of milk. They weren't born with this knowledge though. They gained it by making the same or similar recipes over and over, hundreds of times, until each bit of information was permanently ingrained.

Because they have internalized all that information, they know which ingredients to be precise over, and which ones allow lots of leeway. To an outside observer, it may look like the cook is just throwing ingredients into the pot haphazardly, but with each one there's a mental note of "That seems about right." That's where the "heart" and "soul" come into cooking.

If an inexperienced cook tried to work the same way, the results would likely be less than ideal. They may get lucky, but sooner or later they'll end up with an inedible mess. Therefore it's vitally important for new cooks (or even old cooks trying new dishes) to follow a recipe. This gives them a basis for comparison, which they can then change as their skills and experience allow.

Unsurprisingly, this also applies to cooks who try recipes from medieval sources. To make the challenge more difficult, such sources typically not only lack measurements for quantities or temperatures or times, but they can even lack the common basis of experience that a cook can use to measure these things. The cook must rely on their modern experiences and constantly question their assumptions. Sometimes it works and the dish turns out well. Sometimes not, and the cook has to dig in to figure out where it went wrong. In those cases it really helps if they've measured the ingredients.

Most importantly, if the cook has measured, they can write the recipe down and share it so that others can learn.

TV Interview

Last week I had a brief interview with "Goodday Sacramento" on the Sacramento CBS affiliate.  The fact that this was my first TV appearance meant that I had no idea what to expect.  It turns out that for morning news shows the operating word is "fast" - I don't think I was on the air for more than a minute.  Obviously that's not enough time to go into any significant depth on a subject (and I know I can get awfully wordy), so I thought I'd take some time to give more leisurely answers here for the questions I was asked.

The first question was along the lines of "Why cook medieval recipes?"  My answer was that one could just as easily ask, "Why cook Chinese recipes?" or "Why cook Indian?"  Medieval European cuisine is a unique style of cooking, with its own balance of flavors.  I also noted that the flavors of Medieval English cooking are surprisingly similar to those of modern Indian, leaving out the capsicum peppers.

In medieval England - especially in the 14th and 15th centuries - spices like cinnamon, ginger, cumin, and saffron were used, especially in meat dishes.  The combinations of these spices gives a flavor that is very similar to that in modern cooking in the Mediterranean and India.  On a side note, the word "curry" itself comes from Middle-English, and means "cook".

I was then asked about how hard it is to find recipes.  I said that when I started researching, 20 years ago, it was very difficult.  You needed to be near the right library or know the right people.  Now many of the texts are freely available online, and I have a list of links for them on the website.

This has really changed medieval cooking research an incredible amount.  Not only are libraries now putting images of the original manuscripts online, but researchers (both amateur and professional) are transcribing and translating the documents into multiple languages.  In just the past five years the number of medieval recipe books that are readily accessible to the average geek has gone from a handful to hundreds.  Medieval English and French cookbooks have even been translated into languages like Russian and Japanese.

Finally, I was asked about Thanksgiving dinner.  Given that they didn't celebrate Thanksgiving in medieval Europe (for the most part they still don't, but I've heard that's changing), what medieval foods could be served in it's place?  I responding with a menu that most would find surprising:  honey mustard barbecue chicken, macaroni and cheese, collard greens, and peach pie.

I unintentionally described this as a "traditional menu", but it's more accurately a "menu of traditional foods".  No, I have no record of any medieval cook serving exactly that meal, but all those foods can clearly be traced to England in the 14th century.  I often use that fact to pull people out of the mindset that medieval food was all about huge chunks of roast meat and tankards of wine.  The recipes we have from back then are surprisingly sophisticated and exhibit a wide range of flavors.

There is a copy of the video online.

From a technical viewpoint, I have a few observations.  First is that I look and sound like a total goob.  I'd like to think that it's the fault of the camera angle and the cheap microphone built into the computer - please don't tell me otherwise and ruin my happy delusion.  If I should end up with another interview via Skype, I'll make sure the ambient lighting is better.  The room was fairly well lit about 15 minutes before the start of the interview, but it then clouded up outside and things got too dark.

Gen Con 2011 Schedule

It's now less than three weeks (yikes!) before GenCon.  As in past years, I'm on discussion panels as part of the Writer's Symposium and will be giving a two hour talk about medieval cooking.  Below are the descriptions for this year's events.

SEM1118008 - Medieval Feasts and Food: Making the Fantasy Match Reality
Are you curious what medieval cooking was really like? Do you want your fantasy characters' dinner to be plausible? This seminar takes a look at medieval European cuisine as a whole, and discusses the misconceptions and misunderstandings that pervade the popular view. Some of the topics to be covered are food preservation, medieval dining on the road, common medieval food myths, and some of the strange things you can find in medieval books.
08/04/2011, 8:00 PM, ICC : 243

SEM1119600 - Fictional Food
(Daniel Myers, Linda Baker, Steven Saus, Anton Strout)
Real spacemen don't eat grilled cheese! Little details help make your fiction real and add depth to your characters. Fictional food can also reveal important information about the climate and culture you are crafting. Learn how to make up food and diets that are exotic but still believable.
08/05/2011, 12:00 PM, ICC : 245

SEM1119621 - Category 4 Brainstorm
(Kelly Swails, Daniel Myers, Anton Strout, Steven Saus)
Sometimes ideas don't come easy. It may take a lot of work and rumination to cull a workable idea for a story or book. We offer techniques for brainstorming and discuss the resources we turn to when our thoughts go stale.
08/06/2011, 10:00 AM, ICC : 245

SEM1119622 - Worldbuilding: Men, Monsters, and the Creatures Between
(Linda Baker, Sabrina Klein, Daniel Myers, Ramsey Lundock, Bob Farnsworth)
Men, elves, and the like cannot live in isolation, and monsters don't materialize out of nowhere. People and creatures need to fit into the world's ecology and have a life cycle that makes sense, otherwise your readers will see your world as unrealistic and not worth reading about. Find out what makes creatures and races believable.
08/06/2011, 11:00 AM, ICC : 244

SEM1119640 - Pick Our Brains
(Anton Strout, Jason Sizemore, Daniel Myers)
How dare you consider sleeping in on the final day of this year's Gen Con! We bet there're still questions whirling in your brain about worldbuilding, the publishing industry, sprucing up your manuscript, and whatnot. We're here to provide as many answers as possible.
08/07/2011, 8:00 AM, ICC : 244

At this point I'm a bit frantic (as usual) in trying to get everything ready.

Thoughts on "Medieval Japan"

Every now and then I get asked for recipes or information about medieval cooking outside of Europe, and each time it happens I end up mulling it over for days trying to work out an answer.  I suppose I could say that I focus on Europe (and sometimes I do), but that answer is an evasion.  It doesn't address the question of why I don't research medieval cooking from other cultures.

The first problematical point rests in what is meant by "medieval".  Webster's defines the word as "of, relating to, or in the style of the Middle Ages," and goes on to define the middle ages as:

"... the time in European history between classical antiquity and the Italian renaissance (from about 500 a.d. to about 1350): sometimes restricted to the later part of this period (after 1100) and sometimes extended to 1450 or 1500."

This goes back to the origin of the word, which is from the Latin medium aevum - the middle age, or the time between the classical era and the Renaissance, and most definitions I've seen of "medieval" look something like this.

Europe during this time period had a surprisingly consistent culture.  Yes, there were stylistic and political differences for different regions and countries within Europe, but there was also an amazing degree of uniformity in terms of technology, clothing, and (most significantly) food.

These definitions are rather Roman-centered.  They clearly make sense when applied to Italy: it's the time between the fall of the Roman empire and the Renaissance.  With the extension of years they also make sense when applied to northern Europe (England, France, etc.) as it took much longer for the Renaissance to percolate that far north.  It's a bit of a stretch to get it to mesh with places on the edge of Europe though.

When someone then asks about cooking in medieval Japan (or China, or India, or Central America, etc.) I'm first stuck trying to figure out what "medieval Japanese cooking" means.  Are they asking about Japanese cooking between the years 500 to 1350?  What about 500 to 1500?  Maybe some other date range?  To the best of my (limited) knowledge of Japan, there isn't that much difference in the culture and cooking in Japan between 1000 and 1800, so just where is the dividing line?

Now if they asked about cooking in "feudal Japan", or "India before the British empire", or "pre-1500 Central America," those are concepts I can deal with.  Of course my answer would simply be something like "I just don't study that."  I also suspect that answer would be no more surprising than the response to a car dealer's response to "Why don't you sell bicycles?"

It's not that I don't like Chinese or Indian or other cuisines - as my somewhat padded outline will attest, I like a wide variety of foods.  It's not even that I don't like the history of the other places.  It's just that medieval European cuisine is, in itself, a distinctive cooking system, and since I don't have time to research everything about food and cooking to any real depth, I choose just that one part.

Recommended Book - Food in Medieval England

A couple of weeks back I added this book to the page of Recommended Books, and I've been meaning to post something here about it since then.

Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition
C.M. Woolgar (Editor), D. Serjeantson (Editor), T. Waldron (Editor)
Oxford University Press

This isn't a cookbook, nor is it one of those nice, easy to read books full of general information about medieval European cuisine. It's a collection of papers written by several authors, all detailing recent research into the study of the medieval diet, coming from a scientific perspective (e.g. archaeology) instead of a historical one (e.g. studying old texts).

There's a lot of neat information buried in these papers, but not all of it is easy to get to. Further, many of the papers highlight the promising work currently being done, but do not actually provide much in the way of results - mostly because the research is too new.

For example, until the 1980s or so, when animal bones were found at a medieval archaeological site, the researchers would make a note about them and then throw them away. They didn't realize the information that could be gleaned from them about animal size and age, butchering methods, dietary composition, etc. This has changed for the better, but it takes a very long time to gather enough evidence, study the remains, and to draw useful conclusions.

If the above makes it sound like this book is dry as a desert and useless to the average person with an interest in medieval history, that's certainly not the case. The nineteen papers included all provide valuable clues to what the medieval diet and lifestyle were like, making sure that it is all tied down to evidence instead of conjecture, which is what I expect from Woolgar and company.

There was however one point which made me groan loudly (thus annoying my wife as she was reading her email). In "From Cu and Sceap to Beffe and Motton", N.J. Sykes is noting the way bones were cut and suggests that it indicates the beef was used for making stew. That's all well and fine, but then he goes on to note that "... boiling would have counteracted the taste of tainted meat, ...." That's right, Sykes dropped the Moldy Meat Myth into an academic paper, and of course he provided nothing to support the (nonsensical) assertion. P'feh!

Other than that one (really bad) slip, this book is absolutely geekalicious. I'll be pulling new information out of it for months.

Excuses, excuses...

Before getting into the subject of this rant, here's a warning about what triggered it:

Yes, I've been watching The Tudors

From what I've been told by people who research various aspects of medieval life (clothing, painting, religion, history, etc.) this program is filled with all sorts of wild inaccuracies, so why should cooking and food be treated any differently?

Surprisingly, for a television series that is so lavish with costumes and settings, food is almost ignored (well, maybe that's not too surprising - very few shows or films deal much with food, probably because it's a very hard thing to film well). Where the show does touch on the topic, they seem to invariably go way wrong.

At the end of the second season, King Henry is presented with a swan pie. Awesome! The thing is the right shape, and they even decorated it with the head and wings of the swan. Then Henry breaks the top crust and starts eating the contents with his fingers. This is a minor quibble, I know, but he would have used a spoon. They had spoons in medieval times. They even have spoons at Medieval Times ("Would you like a refill on that Pepsi?").

Then there are the grapes. In almost every scene depicting a dinner or banquet there are grapes on the table - even in the scenes set in winter. Somehow they've got grapes ready for harvest year round in England. That, or they've managed to work out overnight transport from the southern hemisphere.

What really set my teeth on edge though was something in the episode I watched last night. Henry holds up a piece of fruit and tells Suffolk that it comes from the New World. That would have been Ok, but it was a starfruit, which aren't native to anywhere in the New World but instead come from Indonesia.

[Aside: I suppose they could have used a pawpaw, but given their short shelf life that wouldn't have been much better (maybe they were brought over on the same express flight as the grapes). Tomato? No, they were known but considered poisonous. A potato then, or maybe a peanut. Heck, how about tobacco?]

Now some might say that this kind of criticism is misplaced. The show's creator, Michael Hirst, dismissed complaints of inaccuracy by stating "Showtime commissioned me to write an entertainment, a soap opera, and not history ... And we wanted people to watch it."

That's just bunk.

Hirst is spinning his departures from reality as being artistic deviation, changes to make the story more interesting. I'll buy that for the bit with Henry eating the swan pie, but for the other errors it's just an excuse for laziness. Hirst simply doesn't care enough to expend the minuscule amount of effort to even get vaguely close to right (like on the same continent).

In the meanwhile, I keep watching. It is entertaining, after all, and it helps me to keep up with the nonsense that people learn from Hollywood about medieval Europe.

Some Thoughts About Sauces

My son (age 10) learned a lesson about sauces this morning, specifically that when you allow a sauce containing dairy to boil, it breaks.

He was making biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast and got distracted watching his older brother (age 13) play computer games, and the sausage gravy boiled until it looked all grainy.  We strained it to keep the sausage bits and remade the gravy and breakfast was saved, but that got me thinking about sauces.

There are very few milk-based sauces in medieval European cuisine.  Off hand only one comes to mind - Gauncile, which is a garlic flavored cream sauce.  Even Jance, which looks like a dairy-based sauce, uses almond milk.

In the sauce recipes found in medieval English and French cookbooks, the vast majority of them are made with an acid (vinegar, verjuice, or wine) as the base and bread crumbs as the thickener.  This makes sense considering that they had limited control of temperature while cooking over open flame or coals, and this combination of ingredients makes for a sauce that is almost impossible to ruin.

Really, I've tried.  I've many times left a pot of medieval sauce on the heat while distracted by something else (hmm... I think I see where my son gets it from), and even when it's come to a furious boil a little stirring and maybe some water sets it to right again.

Contrast this to many of the modern sauces.  The dairy based ones will break, and the ones thickened with flour or eggs will form lumps if not made correctly.  Medieval sauces just aren't prone to these problems.  This is the reason I frequently say that medieval European cuisine is perfect for new cooks or those who just can't seem to get the hang of working in a kitchen.

Apples, Quince, and Cooks

Some quick updates on assorted subjects:

A couple of weeks back I posted about apple pie recipes, where I'd picked out a few potential recipes to try. The one I settled on, Tartys In Applis, worked out pretty well. Grating the apples was really kind of strange, as was the addition of figs. Still it tasted good. better warm than cold in my opinion. I think a dollop of snowe on top would add some fat to make it even better.

I've posted here before about the quince tree I planted in my back yard. While it has flowered for the past two years and some fruits have formed, this is the first year that any have made it to harvest. I picked the two small quince from the tree last week, and last night I made them into marmalade. It's a small thing (the result is only a single pint) but it's still geeking me out. Hopefully there will be more next year.

Finally, the Middle Kingdom Cooks Collegium is this upcoming weekend in Chicago. There will be cooks from all over the midwest United States (and some from farther away) all gathered together to share their knowledge of medieval cooking. I'll be teaching two classes there - one on food safety and another that is sort of an overview on medieval cooking from a sort of holistic viewpoint. In spite of all that I still need to to to get ready for the event, I'm really looking forward to it.

When the Party's Over

Once again, Gen Con has come and gone, and It'll probably take over a week for me to fully recover. This year was great. I had fun, I learned lots of stuff, and I talked with lots of cool people. The fact that Jean Rabe organizes the Writers' Symposium events for Gen Con every year shows that she's one of the most awesome people ever.

My two hour talk, titled Real Medieval Feasts seemed to go well. It wasn't as much fun to do as the Principles of Medieval Cooking one I've done a number of times, but people still seemed to enjoy it. Attendance seemed smaller than last year - there were only about 60 or so in the audience, and some empty seats. Still, the crowd was responsive and inquisitive.

I was really nervous for the cooking workshop. I'd never done this kind of thing, and the lack of proper cooking facilities made me worry even more. I was so nervous that I managed to burn my fingertips (slightly) while adjusting the element on the cooktop - I hadn't realized it got turned on while setting things up.

Still, I managed to get the food served and did my best to keep the guests entertained. I'd cooked most of the food ahead of time, and that's about the only way I could have done this at all. No one seemed to mind much, and in fact they said I could have charged significantly more (which I'll likely need to do if I try this again next year). Given the cost of dining anywhere near the convention (where a burger, fries, and drink can cost up to $20) I guess I'm not surprised.

One thing I did get a kick out of was that two of the guests were children. Both boys, one around eight years old and the other I'll guess was maybe six, and they were there with their mothers. The kids were very well behaved, tried everything (that I could see) and seemed to like it. These were my kind of kids! If either of the moms are reading this, thank you for raising such nice children.

For the Writers' Symposium panels I was on, I had a great time. I was a bit concerned about the panel on drinking, but it was really fun - and I got to have a nice chat with Linda Baker before and afterwards (Hi Linda!).

The panel on Dark Women worried me even more - it was mis-scheduled in the Gen Con computer, so very few people were there at the start, and I wasn't sure how much I'd be able to contribute (I'm a guy, after all). I think we managed to do pretty well, and we even extended it an extra hour to accommodate the (large!) crowd who showed up for the scheduled time. Paul Genesse had the brilliant idea to draft one of the audience members from the first hour into the panel for the second hour. Susan Carhart (I hope I remembered her name right) was a really neat person to be on a panel with - smart, charming, and all-around fun.

That's about it for now. There are several potential projects that might develop from the convention, but we'll have to wait and see. I'll post some details on what I served at the cooking workshop a bit later this week.

Gen Con 2010 Schedule

It's less than a month before Gen Con, and once again I'll be participating in some of the Writer's Symposium seminars, as well as a couple of events of my own.

On Thursday evening I'll be giving a 2 hour talk about medieval feasts, targeted more towards fantasy authors and role-playing gamers than historians (there does seem to be a surprising amount of overlap though).  I expect this to be a bit rambling, with my usual tendency to sidetrack and distract myself.  Here's the description from the Gen Con catalog:

SEM1008386 - Real Medieval Feasts
Why did they have feasts in medieval Europe? What did they eat? Who paid for it all? This seminar examines real feasts based upon descriptions and menus from medieval sources, and compares the medieval practices with modern misconceptions. Some of the topics to be included are feast foods, entertainment, manners, economics, and the practical challenges of processing two thousand head of poultry. 08/05/2010, 8:00:00 PM, Marriott : Santa Fe

I'm also trying something new this year, a medieval cooking workshop.  It's scheduled for late Saturday afternoon, and essentially is providing an early supper for the participants.  I am understandably a bit nervous about this one, ans there aren't any cooking facilities available.  This means I have to do any cooking using hotplates and the like.  Having worked in equally difficult situations though, I'm sure it'll turn out just fine.

WKS1008387 - Medieval Cooking Workshop
Everything you need to know and not know about the basic techniques and ingredients of medieval European cuisine - complete with roasts, vegetables, pies, sauces, and desserts - complete with a demonstration and full meal. A booklet will be provided to each participant with full recipes for all the dishes made. Due to limited facilities, special dietary requirements cannot be accommodated.
08/07/2010, 4:00:00 PM, Marriott : Santa Fe

Because of the limitations in space and such, I had to limit the number of participants to 15 - and I was surprised at how quickly it sold out.  This is also the first time I've charged anything for a seminar/workshop ($12), but given how much I'll spend on the food it was pretty much unavoidable.  Considering how much the convention center charges for pizza or hot dogs, I suppose it's a good deal.


Here are the Writer's Symposium panels I'll be part of:

SEM1009889 - Bottom's Up!
Is your hero always sober? Does your villain have a drinking problem? When is it appropriate to use alcohol in literature to set a scene, advance the plot, or add some color to your characters? Our panelists look at drinking ... and not just the intoxicating stuff. We’ll delve into medieval drinks and futuristic concoctions and discuss reference material to sate your characters’ thirsts and wet your readers’ whistles.  08/07/2010, 11:00, AM Hyatt : Studio 1

SEM1009908 - Dark Ladies
There is a dark side to the “fairer sex.” In this hour, we’ll focus on female villains, hard-boiled heroines, and tough-as-nails supporting characters. How do you make a female character real without becoming a cliché or done-to-death stereotype?  08/08/2010, 9:00 AM, Hyatt : Studio 1

SEM1009910 - Rounding Your World
If you’re not writing in the “real world,” and you’ve created a land of your own, you have to do more than draw a map, add a river, and sprinkle in some mountains and other geographical features. You have to put a lot of thought into the place. Our panelists will tell you what elements make a fantasy setting believable, including weather, population clusters, animal life, and more. 08/08/2010, 10:00 AM, Hyatt : Studio 1

I'm looking forward to it all, but there's a lot of preparation still to do.

Gen Con and Pennsic

I'm still trying to recover from my week of Pennsic followed by 4 days of Gen Con (talk about culture shock), but I think I'm finally up to writing a bit here about how it all went.

Pennsic
For those who haven't heard of Pennsic, I've been describing it to my co-workers as a cross between Woodstock, A Renaissance faire, and a conference of academic historians.

This year was pretty good. The weather was reasonably cool and dry (soggy start and hot finish notwithstanding), and I didn't get sick at all this year. I spent lots of time taking classes and just hanging around with cool, geeky people.

The big focus for me this year was on book binding. I've been wanting to try making books for years, so I was thrilled to take classes on the subject and to talk with people who do it.

Best of all, I got to bring home some equipment for binding books! I suspect a new project will be coming along shortly.

Gen Con
As I have for the past few years, I sat on some of the Writers' Symposium panels, and I gave a two-hour seminar on medieval European cuisine.

The seminar was to a surprisingly large audience - they moved me from one room because we'd gone over the 100 person capacity. The audience was agreeable, interested, and in a good mood. They seemed to enjoy it, and I received a few compliments here and there, so as far as I can tell it went really well. I'll have to come up with a good topic for next year.

The Writers' Symposium panels were lots of fun, though surprisingly I did feel a bit out of my element on the panel about dragons.

Again, I spent a lot of my time hanging out with geeky people and learning cool (to me) stuff. I didn't buy as much stuff this year as I have in previous years - that's a good thing.

Gen Con Seminar Schedule

In just over two weeks (and three days after I get home from Pennsic), I will be Participating in the Writer's Symposium seminars at Gen Con. I've gone to this convention for several years, and given talks on medieval cooking for the past three or four (I'm losing count).

On Thursday evening at 8:00 p.m. I'll be giving a 2 hour talk about medieval cooking ("Getting Medieval with Food"). This will be a sort of general overview, geared towards fantasy authors and game designers who want to make the food in their work more realistic. Here's the description from the Gen Con events catalog:

SEM0903050 - Getting Medieval with Food
Fantasy games and novels are commonly set in a society based on medieval Europe - except for the food, which is commonly way wrong. Learn how medieval English and French cuisine worked as a system. Topics will include medieval ingredients and preparation methods, the structure of medieval feasts, finding medieval recipes (or making them up), and common myths about medieval foods. 08/13/2009, 8:00 PM - Marriott : Indiana Bllrm D

I'm also very likely to ramble a bit, allow myself to be side-tracked by questions, and maybe even rant.

I'll also be part of the following panel discussions:

SEM0902995 - Food for Thought
A key ingredient to believable characters and stories is food. Heroes, villains, and the supporting cast have to eat from time to time. How can you enrich your writing by adding a dining experience or two? What does food say about the world you've crafted? 08/15/2009, 12:00 PM - Marriott : Lincoln

SEM0903002 - Hunting Dragons
Why has going after dragons been so popular in fiction? Our panelists discuss classic dragon hunters like Beowulf, Saint George, and Bilbo Baggins, in addition to how the hunt has changed over the years. Learn how to shape the classic story into something fresh and exciting. 08/15/2009, 3:00 PM - Marriott : Santa Fe

SEM0903003 - Stealing History
Why recreate the wheel each time you create a story, character, or world? Yes, you can build your knighthood or priesthood or religion or society from scratch, but taking what's historically known and warping it might fit the proverbial bill and depth and believability. Join our panelists for a discussion on how we can mine our own rich history for characters, backgrounds, worlds, cosmology, scenery, and more. 08/15/2009, 4:00 PM - Marriott : Santa Fe

On the whole, I expect it to be lots of fun.

Searching through the Searches

Apparently I need to be more clear on the functionality of the Medieval Cookbook Search.

Every now and then I like to look through the various log files generated by my web hosts. This allows me to find out if someone like the BBC recently linked to the site, or if some recipe is surprisingly popular, or if there's something wrong with the HTML code, etc.

I've recently become aware that a number of people are entering things into the Medieval Cookbook Search that aren't going to return much in the way of useful information. I originally set the search engine up to find recipes in various medieval sources which contain a particular ingredient. It incorporates a sort of "translation" feature that copes with the wild spelling variations of Middle English. A couple of years later I added the capability of searching for multiple ingredients at the same time (which turned out to be a lot easier than I thought it would be).

What I didn't anticipate when building the indexes though was that some people would enter the name of a recipe. I can add this, but it'll take some time.

I also didn't expect people to enter such things as "food" and "cookery". Just what do they expect to find with those keywords in a bunch of medieval cookbooks? Even stranger, if they mistakenly thought it was a search for the entire website, what did they expect it to return given that the whole website is about "food" and "cookery"?

I can rig up some code so that if nothing is found in the cookbooks, it'll offer a generic search for the whole website (thanks be to Google), which will help with terms like "white", "mousse", and "cookie".

Which brings me to search terms like "Moo Moo". That is just plain silly, and I won't write special code for it (though I suppose I could ...).

QED

Anyone who has talked to me long enough is probably aware that I am an ardent proponent of digitizing old and out-of-copyright documents and making them publicly available on the Internet. I can provide any number of reasons for doing this, such as the distribution of information to facilitate and promote research, but just this week the world was given a startling example of why we shouldn't keep all of our historical texts in one metaphorical basket.

On Tuesday, the six story building housing the Cologne City Archives collapsed. This building housed many medieval documents, charters, and such, some of which were probably destroyed and all were most likely severely damaged. There was almost no notice that anything was wrong, which means there was no time to get anything out of the building.

Throughout history texts have been lost in this general sort of way. Fires, wars, floods, or just plain age and decay take their toll. The information in newer books isn't as likely to be lost since there are usually multiple copies in various locations, but older documents are typically the only copy, so if we lose that one then the information in it is gone forever.

What makes this particularly sad is that with the current state of technology, the cost of digitizing such documents and widely distributing them (thereby potentially protecting them forever) is almost nothing. Yes, there are some cases where any kind of touch is going to destroy a document, so the digitization process needs to be ultra-high resolution blah blah blah 'cause we're only going to get one chance and we have to do it right, but for the vast majority of books and manuscripts out there this isn't the way it is.

All it takes is a volunteer with a cheap digital camera (which can even be borrowed). They can go into a library and photograph the document. Then the images can be uploaded to public sites like Wikimedia Commons. Others can then stitch the images together and convert them to a PDF file suitable for the Internet Archive's Text Archive, or transcribe them to text for Project Gutenberg. Each time this is done - no matter how small or insignificant the text - it's a gift to the world.

Of course, key in this process is the library that owns the document in question. Some libraries are more than willing to accommodate such amateur archivists. The Indianapolis Public Library for example allowed me to photograph and transcribe A Noble Boke off Cookry. Other libraries though see their rare books as a rare asset, and that the fewer people allowed access to their rare books, the higher the status of their rare books collection (you can imagine how I feel about that). Sometimes libraries have their own digitization process, usually high quality, which since it is usually expensive is therefore subject to budgets and funding cuts and the like - a case of making the best the enemy of the good (and sometimes they only make their digitized collection available to very few, or sell distribution rights to companies like Proquest who charge large subscription fees - again, you can imagine how I feel about that).

Still this is one of the areas where the little guy can make a difference. If you have access to a digital camera and a copyright-free text that isn't publicly available, photograph it (with the owner's permission) and upload it. If you're not sure what text to digitize or how to go about it, I'll be happy to offer suggestions. Heck, even if it's just some obscure Victorian pamphlet on apiaries, I'm sure someone in the future doing research on late 19th century English references to bees will thank you. [Ok, even that sounds interesting to me - I'm such a geek]