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Between schedules and priorities and whatnot, this is the first of the several annual West Coast Culinary Symposia that I've attended. An entire weekend of historic food geeking. (Mostly SCA, but there was a strong outreach to local non-SCA interested parties this year and we got a good handful of people from other historic groups and simply interested non-hobbyists.) Back when things were getting organized I kept dithering about what I wanted to teach until almost too late, but then the open-fire cooking teacher had to cancel and since I'd wanted to do something along that line I got a 3-hour slot to teach beginning heat management and working with reproduction cookware. (I'd play-tested the idea at Erinwood Arts last year, which was good because it helped with time management.)

So I took Friday off work because I knew I wanted to do all the ingredient prep for my class in advance, and simply because I wanted it to be as relaxing an event as possible rather than having to be all packed by Thursday night and then dashing off after work Friday. So I was able to sleep in, pack in a leisurely fashion, stop by the Compass Star for lunch on the way out, and get to the site an hour before official opening time. The event was at the Bothin Youth Center (a Girl Scout camp) in Marin which had the advantage of multiple buildings each with its own kitchen facilities and the ... um ... feature of dormitory style housing with bunk beds. (Note that I'm not complaining about the housing -- it was cheap and reasonably comfortable and very sociable.) There was a lot of late partying in the various dorm common rooms, although I think I got to be by 11 both nights, on general principles. (Also because the socializing in the common rooms involved an extremely high decibel level and I hit my tolerance level fairly quickly.)

Besides which, I had an open-fire cooking class to teach first thing on Saturday, which meant that when other people were wandering down to the main dining hall for breakfast, I was already in the middle of setting up for class at the outdoor cooking area and getting coals started and all. I had 10 students (working in pairs) and a variable number of auditors. The cooking area was a sunken pit about 12 ft diameter, with a raised grill feature (which we didn't use) sticking out from one side. So we had 5 cooking stations set up around the edge of the protruding grill, plus I had my portable fire box set up for a 6th fire. The idea was to get the students in practice working up a good set of coals (I'd started a small heap for each station in advance) then they would rotate between equipment for 5 types of cooking: simple boiling (meatballs in broth, plus a thickened sauce), gentle heating (custard), pan-frying (payn perdu), deep-frying (crisps, i.e., medieval funnel-cakes), and wafers. Plus I had a couple pans of Smale Brydes y-Stewed going in the separate fire-box which was sort of an extra-credit item (although it ended up being more for me to amuse myself with so I didn't over-manage the students).

My optimistic plan was for all students to get to do all 5 stations, but it took longer than expected to get the coals all built up and I think people only got to 2-3 stations by the end of the 3 hour period. (This meant I had a bunch of leftover prepared ingredients, about which more later.) Nobody complained (to me) about not getting to do all the techniques and I got a lot of positive feedback on the underlying concept of the class. A number of the students were really fired up about getting their own equipment and doing more reproduction-cookware cooking in the future. (I even got a kickback from Mercy the Potter for creating new clients for her pottery!) Now I need to format up the class handout for the symposium proceedings (and add things like where to get equipment and supplies, and maybe some more discussion on "lessons learned").

After lunch and the featured speaker I took a class-period off to go back and clean up after my class (i.e., the equivalent of packing down after a day-event) then got to relax for the rest of the event. I spent the rest of Saturday afternoon following The One True Whey in the cheese track ("Cooking with Cheese" and a cheese tasting of medievally plausible cheeses, both by the_cheese_lady. One feature of the event was that dishes cooked during the classes became part of the food plan, so the results of my class were served as part of lunch, and dinner included all manner of class projects, including a gilded cockatrice that breathed flame. There was a presentation of research papers after dinner in the main hall, then off to (brief) partying and bed. Sunday breakfast was leftovers -- a term that does no justice to the wonder that the morning-after detritis of a culinary symposium can be. (A roast pork leg from the class on breaking a pig carcass, leftover saffron custard pies, the pilaws from layla_lilah's class that hadn't quite finished in time for dinner, fresh skyr, and more and more.)

Sunday morning I took part in the panel presentation on the history, development, and scope of the Perfectly Period Feast Movement ... which garnered some very enthusiastic new adherents this weekend. Then it was a matter of packing, helping a little with clean-up, and home again. After emptying the car, before I could lose momentum, I cooked up the unused ingredients from my class, so the fridge now contains a serving of Pompes (meatballs with almond milk sauce), Smale Bryddes, and a massive stack of cheesy wafers (more on which below). Much as I hate waste, I just dumped the leftover batter for the Crisps because I didn't want to deal with deep-frying (and the crisps are best when fresh and that much fried food is Not On My Eating Plan). The leftover eggs from the custard and payn perdu stations got hardboiled and I'll probably turn them into deviled eggs to take to Wednesday practice or something.

Having now done some intensive parallel wafer-making with my two wafer irons, I find I much prefer the incised iron one (that I picked up from someone at the Villa Luna rummage sale last summer) over the aluminum pizzelle-style iron I picked up a number of years ago. The pizzelle iron makes a deeper, more waffle-like item, but is more prone to getting bits of batter stuck in the grooves and the results for my standard batter tend to be more crepe-like in behavior. Whereas the incised iron one (i.e., the design is simple lines in a flat face) had almost no sticking at all and produced a relatively crisp product (using about half the batter per wafer that the pizzelle uses). It also seemed to require less frequent oiling. I've been thinking it would be fun to make wafers over the campfire at events to fill the ecological niche of marshmallow-toasting, and the new wafer iron would work much better for this since using seems to be a much lower maintenance process.

I think my next on-site cooking goal will be to get the spit set up for my fire-box (including some sort of automatic turning mechanism, although I'm still exploring options on that end). I should be able to get something worked up by West-An Tir War. Plenty of time!

I pulled up my online paystub this afternoon to see if my annual gym membership reimbursement got processed in time to be on this deposit and was pleasantly surprised to discover that the special bonus related to the Headless Chicken Project that my boss had hinted at was also in this period's deposit. A rather nice, hefty bonus. I was severely tempted to take myself out to dinner and a movie to celebrate it, but tonight was scheduled for making my potluck contribution for tomorrow's dinner at Collegium, so I did the Responsible Thing and stayed in. (Besides which, I'm already planning to celebrate it with a nice lunch out with thread_walker next week. One shouldn't celebrate the same item too much.)

Tomorrow I'll be reprising my "Genealogy of Clothing Construction" slide show (basically: a survey of basic construction strategies and how they relate to each other physically, if not always evolutionarily) and participating in a panel on "Food and Compromise". Sunday I'm doing "Conversational Medieval Welsh", which I don't think I've taught since I was a guest teacher at Caid Collegium a number of years ago. It's convenient to be able to pull out a couple of classes that both require no advance preparation and yet aren't something I've done at all recently. But it really is time to put together some new material for next Spring's collegium.

Investiture yesterday saw duchessletitia properly installed as Princess of the Mists (oh, yeah, there was a guy involved somewhere in there too). It was a bit of an odd day. Being on court, I didn't want to bring or plan other stuff to do (too easy to get distracted) but there were plenty of courtiers and not that much to do, so I spent a lot of time just wandering around and chatting. And there wasn't much on the day's schedule other than the courts, a handful of competitions, and some fighting in the middle of the afternoon. On the one hand, it's good for an event not to be crazy-overscheduled, but I think that sometimes we lean a little too far to the other side. If I'm going to drive several hours and dress up in funny clothes, I'd like to focus on the otherworldly experience, not simply sit around and chat with my friends. I wrote a brief rant about this in comments elsewhere regarding A&S Tourney, where evidently lots of people have been saying they don't want to be bothered with having classes on Sunday -- they just want to laze around in camp and hang out with their friends. I love hanging out lazily with my friends but I can do that on my own time and my own dime. When I go to an SCA event, I want to do medieval (or at least SCA) things.

Getting back to Investiture, the feast was delicious, if a trifle drawn out. I brought home some of the leftovers and this morning's lazy brunch-on-the-deck was an omelette filled with mussels in bruet and aquapatys, followed by fruit rissoles.

I had some really lovely conversations with aureellia about the economics of medieval lawsuits over manure. Hmm. I just got a truly crazy whacked-out idea for an in-persona collegium presentation -- not for any particular topic, but just as a general structure for presenting information in an entertaining way. Enact a medieval lawsuit. Over whatever the topic of the class is. Have people present their claims and counterclaims before a presiding judge (or nobleman). Have lawyers chime in with precedents and recollections of similar cases. Have neighbors and such like as witnesses, whether of material fact or simply of character. The presentation could be educational not merely about the topic of the lawsuit, but also about the processes and nature of medieval law. And, of course, there are a variety of legal systems that could be used, depending on culture and era (and different likely topics for lawsuits). This could be a lot of fun. Shall have to think further.

Session 73: Dress and Textiles I: Threads and Fibers

Evidence for Roundels in Viking Age Embroidery from Bjerringhøj, Mammen Parish, Denmark (Raven Alexandra Fagelson, Independent Scholar)

The paper looks at the Mammen embroideries with a focus on a compositional analysis of the geometry of the motifs to try to reconstruct their possible original layout. All the acanthus motifs occur in a curved arc, as does one line of small “face” motifs. In two cases (one acanthus, one small-face) then two fragmentary arcs occur on the same textile. Examples of other embroideries with arrangements of roundels occur in a similar time-frame (early medieval) in a number of different contexts (cloaks, altar cloths) with dizes ranging from small (Maasik embroidery) to very large (cloak of ?Henry II? with essentially one large roundel taking up the majority of the back. Acanthus and other foliate borders of roundels are demonstrated from a variety of sources. By mathematical calculation, the acanthus arcs could be part of a 22 cm diameter circle and the small faces to a ca. 35 cm diameter circle. Roundel motifs on textiles normally have “contents” and the leopard, bird, and quadruped motifs occur in conjunction with acanthus/face arc fragments. Roundels often occur in lines or arrays and often are conjoined where they approach, and some of the acanthus motifs appear to approach each other in this fashion, although the geometry is somewhat off.

Fur, Feathers, Skin, Fiber, Wood: Representational Techniques in the Bayeux Tapestry (Gale R. Owen-Crocker)

The embroidery depicts a wide variety of natural and man-made textures. Only two stitch types are used: stem stitch and laid-and-couched, and only 10 colors. The types of stitches chosen may be determined by the scope and speed of the work. The background fabric is left blank – there’s a similar embroidery in silk but with a blank linen background (in Italy?) Texture of fur or feathers are rare, there’sa quadrupen with “tags” on a plain background, and a peacock with the tail depicted in individual feathers, and one other bird, but otherwise broad areas of animals are plain L&C with outlines. Bodies, as of birds, are divided into parts by stem-stitch lines (e.g., beaks, wings, wing-pinions and tail feathers) similarly to the outlined sections of clothing. Lines of couching in both animals and clothing often follow the general contour of the segment, rather than being absolute. Although the general rule is that stem stitch is always outlines and couching for fills, there are some small areas of fill done in stem stitch, e.g., a bird’s pinions. Often this happens in long narrow spaces, e.g., bird legs. Some use of stem for texture, e.g., a horse’s mane, but this is inconsistant. Human skin is left as the ground cloth (a technique also used in manuscripts where only outlines of features are indicated with skin left as the plain parchment). In crowd scenes, the outlines of faces/hands and blocks of hair often seem artificially varied, simply for visual interest (also done for clothing, but less artificial there). Individualization of horses both by position and color of both horse and equipment. A few failures of this distinction, possibly due to poor planning by multiple workers, changed in mid-project to maintain a contrast between adjacent figures.

Flax and Linen in Medieval Novgorod (Heidi M. Sherman, Univ. of Wisconsin–Green Bay)

Archaeology important for history of trade in Russia due to scarcity of written sources. Soviet Union sponsored massive numbers of excavations providing a wealth of research material. Scholars agree that Novgorod had important flax trade but not much previous work done on the topic. Work on wooden artifacts includes lots of flax processing tools. (Digression into political dynamics of the day.) Types of relevant finds: scutches, breakers, combs, hackles, spindles & whorls, distaffs, parts of looms (although these last three are not flax-specific), also flax seeds and seed-pods. Some arguments over whether the toothed wooden “hackles” might instead be fish-scalers – much larger number of these hackles in comparison to scotches which might suggest another interpretation. (me: These aren’t the iron-toothed hackles that look similar to wool combs but look more like a short weaving-sword with a series of shallow notches along one edge of variable size.) Households typically had scutches and spinning equipment but not typically the “hackles”. In contrast, a different style of hackle is a narrow long-toothed comb that looks more like a “paintbrush” shape (i.e., a housepainting paintbrush).

Distaff, Whorl, and Wheel: Medieval Views of Spinning (Janilee Plummer, Ball State Univ.)

Analysis of 10-15th c. images of spinners primarily from Western Europe.
Categories:
Religious: Eve, Virgin Mary, other femail saints, annunciation of the shepherds, other
Daily chores: spinning while tending sheep, while doing other everyday activities
Defense: e.g., using a distaff as a weapon
Ephemera: marginal illustrations unrelated to story, grotesques, animals
Men: unmanly men (hesitant to go to war, being laughed at or abuse), but also professional spinners e.g., of rope or hunting equipment

Eve depicted spinning as a symbol of physical labor as punshment for the Fall. But then Mary is depicted spinning as a symbol of being a “virtuous woman”. Hmm. The distaff-weapon isn’t only in inter-gender violence – image of Sarah beating Hagar with a distaff, a woman beating off a fox from her geese (me: but this follows an image of a fox-bishop preaching to the geese, so there may be other symbolic layers here). Tacuinum Sanitatis shows women spinning with a distaff while walking for other purposes. All sorts of marginal animals depicted spinning (ape, pig) in parallel with other types of activities. Male spinners: depicted as objects of derision or as a symbol of the unwarlike or unmanned man (e.g., Hercules forced to spin). The exception is for non-textile spinning, e.g., men in the Hunt Book of Phoebus Gaston depicted spinning rope for hunting nets. (Also unusual in that the spinning process involves two people – one turning the wheel (with a crank?) the other drafting the thread.

So clearly it's time to start thinking of a class to teach at West Kingdom Collegium in late April. I'm already involved in one proposal for a panel-discussion sort of thing on strategizing compromises in fabric choice for historic costuming. But I'd like to do something else on my own. I can't fall back on my usual "what new thing have I learned lately?" And my mind always goes blank trying to remember what people have said they'd like me to teach (either repeaters or new classes). I suppose I could do one of the shorter slide-show classes that I put together for the Vallejo Music Theater lectures last fall. The one on problems and sources in researching medieval Welsh costume has some more broadly applicable methodological themes. But I always get stuck trying to think what people might like me to reprise from older material. It's sort of like being at a bardic circle or filksing and have someone say, "Sing something!" If I don't have any new material, it's all pretty much the same to me and I have no clue what people might want to hear if I don't get a more specific request.