Interesting article in the globe today about the down economy hitting Roslindale. We were concerned when it didn’t even mention that we were leaving, until we noticed that they’d already taken our move into account by removing our building from the map.

I love the idea that butchers and thrift stores are counter cyclical - I used to tell anyone who would listen that this was one of the great things about a used bookstore as well. I’m not really sure it’s true in any of the three cases (certainly not for used bookstores), but it’s a good story.

Once in a while I like to take a look at web searches that landed people on the blog - here are a few winners from the last three days:

blancmange become a star (this is a mystery - an obscure synth-pop band? A rotund cricket player? I can’t figure it out)

proffessional eater (which, though misspelled landed someone on the page where I claimed my professional eater name would be The Locust - on revisiting this, it’s still true)

pickled lampreys (I get a good number of lamprey hits)

great lakes polluted (see above)

chaucer on pie

Henry Rollins (more even than lamprey I get weekly hits on my claim that Rollins pitched for the reds in the 90’s. Just a few weeks ago someone dropped me a note to let me know it wasn’t him. Luckily Tor was there to straighten the guy out. Hard core fans don’t know jack about baseball.)

Nice little article in the Bulletin about our move - you’ll notice I successfully looked as wretched as possible so that our new customers will be pleasantly surprised when they see me in person.

Mortreux, as expected, was somewhat simpler to make than blank manger but more of a challenge from an edibility standpoint. As it takes its name from the ingredients being mortared, I felt it was incumbent upon me to mortar everything - you can’t take chances with medieval cuisine.

Here’s the recipe again:

Mortrews. Take hennes and pork and seeth hem togyder. Take the lyre of hennes and of the pork and hewe it small, and grinde it al to doust; take brede ygrated and do therto, and temper it with the self broth, and alye it with yolkes of ayren; and cast theron powdour fort. Boile it and do therin powdour of gynger, sugur, safroun and salt, and loke that it be stondying; and flour it with powdour gynger.

What I did was:

Boiled a half chicken with ham hocks (I was unable, after a few tries, to procure pork liver. Who knew?) - because you use a fair amount of the resulting broth in the recipe, I reduced the stock for a while. I then stripped the chicken and the hocks and mortared the meat into a stringy mass.

Cooked about 1/2 pound of chicken livers and mortared them into a fine paste.

In the mortar, I then ground black pepper, galingal (there is some discussion on whether this is the proper medieval galingal - it’s in the ginger family), alkanet (for color, should have used more), nutmeg, and cubeb berries which was my answer to the “strong spice” in the recipe. I added that to the meat and liver and added, bread crumbs, stock, three egg yolks, and saffron. I brought it back to a boil and let it reduce until it seemed like I’d better stop. I powdered it with ginger and let it set. I did not use sugar, though, in retrospect, it probably would have been fine. With so many other flavors in there, it couldn’t have done much harm.

It ended up somewhat reminiscent of pate, though, visually, I have to admit it looked more like cat food.

Served on crusty bread, it had much more flavor than anything I’m used to - not flavor in the spicy sense, but a strange bevy of tastes that co-mingled, overlapped, and attempted to out do each other in the mouth. In this it seemed right - anachronistic, odd, and no doubt perfect if you were working with slightly spoiled meat. Honestly though, it was not bad at all - after you got over the initial shock of it not tasting like anything familiar, you sort of settled in and enjoyed it for what it was. It made a nice sandwich for lunch the next day as well. If you’re trying this at home, shoot for more pepper and less mace and nutmeg - you’ll end up with something that is, while perhaps less authentic, tastier.

The Pye was lovely though:

It contained apples, pears, figs, currants, cubeb berries, cinnamon, cardamom (green), mace, nutmeg. Here the flavors very nearly complemented each other - if you were to dice all the fruits together, and perhaps even cook them together before putting them in the coffin, I think it would be perfect. As it was, one out of every three bites had a lovely melding of flavors, but the rest seemed just slightly disconnected from the ideal Platonic PYE. We used dried figs - fresh figs would no doubt be superior.

Here’s a (slightly out of focus) cross section:

It’s true - Pazzo Books, Roslindale’s award winning bookstore is moving in May to 1898 Centre Street, West Roxbury. We’ve had a ball here in Roslindale, and we’ll miss everyone terribly (but we’ll miss you all less if you truck on over to our new location), but our business never quite developed as we’d hoped, as far as walk in traffic, and our repeated attempts to find something more central in the Square never quite panned out, for a variety of reasons.

We’ll be having a sale in May and will be looking for a home for the skee-ball (which, tragically, won’t be making the trip). Hopefully you’ll all continue to patronize Pazzo (oh, great idea Pazzo, you’re the tops, really) - we’ll be ever so conveniently located between the CVS and Roche Brothers on Centre Street (and just a block from that somewhat tragic looking Blockbuster). Why, just wander out the Roche Brothers parking lot and you’re practically there.

For all of you Rozzites who do errands in West Roxbury, we’re working on an online errand optimizer - just plug in your errands and it will show you when the optimum time to stop at Pazzo is.

We’re very excited to meet all you West Roxburians, and we hope you’ll come by early and often - we’re right next door to The Irish Cottage and the next block down from Sugar and The New Deal.

Ciao!

Updated to note that this is not an April Fool’s joke - I’m afraid we really are on the move. Also to note that the train station is right behind where the shop will be - can you imagine anything more romantic than a train journey to your local used book store? Take a loved one, take a stranger, pack a lunch.

All week the a city bus going up and down Washington St. has been backfiring aggressively every time it slows down (which typically means every time it’s outside the store) - and it’s loud, more akin to a shotgun blast than a normal car backfire. People are visibly shaken when unprepared - children cry, women swoon, men grit their teeth or howl at the heavens. It’s not pretty. What’s shocking is that this has been going on all week and either no one has complained (impossible) or no one is interested.

It was the 50 Bus last time I saw, but they change at Forest Hills. Maybe they can’t keep track of which one is backfiring so they can’t fix it. Seems like a Kafka or Gogol story with some beleaguered bus inspector always one step behind, feverishly trying to do his job which seems increasingly impossible and pointless. Poor guy.

It occurs to me that this dish could be especially unpleasant to eat unless handled with extreme care. Now I’m picturing something more along the lines of a paté than a meat/liver soup, but this still doesn’t save the dish from the sugar and ginger. Luckily, the recipe for the concoction referred to as strong spice has been lost, so I get to make up anything reasonable - still, this little bit of latitude is going to have to go a long way.

As to pies: Chaucer was probably talking about fish or meat pies, so, though Apple Pye was around (before America! Imagine!) and relatively common in England and France, I may have to go with the savory variety of pie - maybe fish, it being Lent and all. Or both.

Here’s a 14th century recipe for apple pie:

XXIII. FOR TO MAKE TARTYS IN APPLIS.

Tak gode Applys and gode Spycis and Figys and reysons and Perys and
wan they are wel ybrayed colourd [1] wyth Safroun wel and do yt in a
cofyn and do yt forth to bake wel.

And fish pie:

XXV. FOR TO MAKE TARTYS OF FYSCH OWT OF LENTE.

Mak the Cowche of fat chese and gyngener and Canel and pur’ crym of
mylk of a Kow and of Helys ysodyn and grynd hem wel wyth Safroun and
mak the chowche of Canel and of Clowys and of Rys and of gode Spycys
as other Tartys fallyth to be.

These two really bring minimalism to a new level.

I’ve been lax - my inability to find a legal way to procure peacock had me down - they run the streets of Miami wild and carefree, why can’t I eat one? I’ve debated the merits of Turkish Partridge versus the more genuine English grey partridge and the sort of genuine French red-legged partridge. The former is easily obtainable, the second endangered and the third somewhere in between but, unlikely in any case, to be found in Massachusetts. Is sea bream an appropriate substitute for Chaucer’s breem (And many a breem and many a luce in stuwe)? Would tiger muskie be permissible in lieu of pike?

Difficult and weighty questions, there is no doubt. But we forge onward for we are, after all, forgers and hungry.

So while the fowl and thousand thousand slimy questions get sorted out, we will eat Mortreux and a pie.

From Forme of Cury, ca. 1390.

Mortrews. Take hennes and pork and seeth hem togyder. Take the lyre of hennes and of the pork and hewe it small, and grinde it al to doust; take brede ygrated and do therto, and temper it with the self broth, and alye it with yolkes of ayren; and cast theron powdour fort. Boile it and do therin powdour of gynger, sugur, safroun and salt, and loke that it be stondying; and flour it with powdour gynger.

Take chicken and pork and boil them together. Take the livers of the chicken and pork and dice it and then grind it finely (to dust, as suggested, sounds difficult. trans. note); throw in some bread crumbs and mix in some broth (from boiling the chicken and pork earlier), some egg yolks and strong spices. Boil it adding ginger, sugar, saffron and salt and let set (it should be more or less a solid at the end of this, apparently). Sprinkle on ginger.

Next I will pick out a pie and get to cooking.

Darwin, 1809 - 1882

Bryant, 1794 - 1878

Bryant suspiciously published “Poetical Works. Collected and arranged by the author” in 1879, a year after he “died”.

Go forth under the open sky, and list
To Nature’s teachings, while from all around—
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—
Comes a still voice

From Thanatopsis; another mystery, solved.

Whitey Mclaughlin, the cobbler next door to the shop died Monday the 28th. He’d been hospitalized for pneumonia for some time, but somehow it seemed like he’d beat it back - grind it down with his impossible stamina, and be back at work. We’ll miss you Whitey - he was a true son of Roslindale, cobbler for over 60 years on Washington St., and it won’t be the same without him, not at Pazzo, not in the Square, and a little bit of Boston has gone out of the world.

But I’m sure he’s back at work, cobbler to angels, and if they don’t wear shoes in heaven, I’m sure a few words from Whitey will set them straight on that point.

The wake will be at F.J. Higgins from 4-8 P.M. on Thursday and the funeral mass will be held at Sacred Heart on Friday at 10 A.M.

On January 1st, I made my first Eating Chaucer dish (I’m a little late in the recording, but I’ve been trying to track down a peacock), blank maunger (or blancmanger, blaumaunger, or blanc manger as Chaucer, a more continental figure, would have it). Here is the recipe as it appears in The Forme of Cury:

Blank maunger. Take capouns and see6 hem, 6enne take hem vp; take almaundes blaunched, grynde hem & alay hem vp with the same broth. Cast the mylk in a pot. Waisshe rys and do 6erto, and lat it seeth; 6anne take 6e brawn of 6e capouns, teere it small and do 6erto. Take white grece, sugur and salt, and cast 6erinne. Lat it see6, 6enne messe it forth and florissh it with aneys in confyt, red o6er whyt, and with almaundes fryed in oyle, and serue it forth.”

The 6s are supposed to be the Old English letter eth (which looks like a backwards 6 with a line through the top curl) - they could also be thorns - both are pronounced more or less like th and I could never tell the difference. Anyway, I read this somewhat sparse recipe a few times to try to figure out amounts, tried the semi-authentic medieval cookbook Pleyn Delit and consulted Martino de Como’s The Art of Cooking for additional inspiration. The Como didn’t seem to work at all, and the Pleyn Delit recipe had fish in it (I’m willing to have sweetened rice/chicken for desert but I’m going to have a work up to something like fish).

So I mostly went with my gut. The key to the recipe turns out to be the almond milk - a staple of medieval English cookery. It’s made, in this case, by reserving some of the broth from boiling the chicken, adding crushed almonds and bringing it to a slow boil. As the almonds boil, milky plumes bubble up from the almonds. If you were using clear water instead of the chicken broth this calls for, I’ve no doubt that you would end up with something resembling milk (I’ll get a shot of this later, almond milk is bound to show up again). I used a little cinnamon stick and a vanilla bean (anachronistic, I know - vanilla wasn’t available in Europe until the early 16th century. I have no defense save usefulness and my dislike for the suggested anise. You could also use nutmeg, all spice, cloves or grains of paradise) to add additional flavor to the milk.

All you do it tear up the chicken breast (I boiled a whole chicken to get some nice broth and then tore up the breasts), add two cups of cooked rice, the almond milk (which is strained to get the almonds out) - it tells you to cast the almond milk into the pot which sounds exciting but makes a bit of a mess - some sugar, I used about 12 tablespoons, and mash it all into a bowl to set. For garnish, I fried sliced, blanched, almonds in oil until they were good and brown and crispy and spread those on top. It looked like this.

Here’s a cross section.

It set nicely - thick and substantial but still very moist and reasonably light, considering. I left it overnight but I would guess it takes only 6-8 hours. It was sweet and savory at once, and the toasted almonds gave it a really nice sort of opulence and nutty interest. Though a number of people seemed to think a sweet rice dish with chicken was strange, no one who ate it seemed to find it odd - not even my 12 year old sister who gobbled it up, and she eats like a bird (a lark, actually). It might even be more appealing to children who are more in touch with the idea of throwing a bunch of stuff they like together and eating it.

Though there was a pretty good amount of liquid in there, the rice soaked everything up as it set. If you cooked the rice with way too much water a la congee, maybe it would thicken but stay wet? Either way, the flavors blended together nicely, though I should have gone heavier on the cinnamon. You could make it sweeter and more desert like by adding more sugar (honey could be interesting as well), but eventually you’d lose the sweet/savory mix that makes it unique. Experimenting with additional sugar and salt should eventually yield the perfect mix.

De como has a recipe that used rice flour instead of rice which should result in something more gelatinous like custard (and also more like the blanc manger that exists today which often calls for gelatin), there are also period recipes where the blanc manger is used more like a sauce over chicken.

I should really just knock in there and see what’s going on, but the puzzle seems more entertaining, for now. Current guesses, as furniture continues to go in, are either an office (if it’s real estate, someone’s got some splainin’ to do) or a reseller of IKEA furniture. The black, apparently retailesque shelving, with the addition of the modular desks has taken on a more foreboding aspect. Hope reigns supreme though.

Update: It turns out it’s a design firm that designs strollers - so it all makes sense, more or less.

In other news, Rick points outpp that a new cafe is going in at the old Ranchero spot at the north end of Adam’s park.

As we approach the beginning of my Eating Chaucer project, I’ll lay down some ground rules for the cooking of the food. I will try to stick with methods that were, liberally, available in the 13th/14th centuries. This means no microwaves (which I abhor anyway), no convection ovens, Forman grills, rice cookers (though I may use a crock pot) etc. I hope to build an outdoor grill for roasting - maybe based on the descriptions in Apicius’s De re coquinaria. Even though it’s a 5th century text, it has better descriptions of cooking systems than most of the medieval stuff out there, and I have a nice new edition of it. Really though, it’s just an excuse to finish off my patio and I need to collect as many motivators as possible to get my ass in gear. I’m sure more rules will materialize as I try to balance adding layers of interesting difficulty and making this process possible and non-lethal.

I’ll probably grind my spices with a mortar and pestle until I get tired of that, but I’ll do all of the preparation intensive things at least once (I only so I can take pictures and pretend that I always did it like that). I’ll get my chickens at Mayflower Polutry and shop at Savenors until I run out of money. Hopefully Quality Meat Market and the Roslindale Fish Market will be able to help me out with some of the more obscure items - even relatively common items like partridge and bream can be a pain to find these days.

Looks like something is happening at the old Sandpaper homestead on Birch St. - workers, some black retail looking shelving, lights - anyone have an inkling what’s up?

In other news, we’ve gone from being conspicuously absent (well, conspicuous to us, anyway) from the 2007 Not for Tourists, Boston, to being mentioned in passing in the 2008 edition We like to keep our victories bite sized around here:

What Rozzie lacks in hip bars, it makes up for in restaurants like Delfino, shopping like Joanne Rossman and Pazzo, and a surprisingly large amount of bakeries like Fornax Bread Baking Company. If you wanna get your drink on, you’ll have to hightail it for JP.

An 1865 ad for the “Union Mowing Machine” is one of the only other indications (other than the Commanders of Our Forces board game) in Leavitt’s Alamanac that the Civil War was going on. Though it claims that the name derives from the fact that the machine was the union of all good and practical improvements in mowing, it would be interesting to get some sales figures from the Confederacy. You can picture some poor salesman in Charleston getting the latest catalog from Warde and Humphrey and trying to plot sales pitches.

Fifty-two years later, New Hampshirites were still referring to Southerners as “crackers”.

We got a run of New Hampshire almanacs from 1840-1919 (for sale here as we catalog them) recently and, while many of the recipes and observations are pretty entertaining, the best parts are the often the old advertisements. From 1862-1865, Eastman of NH sold a board game called Commanders of Our Forces - “Our National Game” where kids could command the Union army in “The most POPULAR, FASHIONABLE, INSTRUCTIVE, and INTERESTING game on the market”. So, if you wondered how appropriate Iraq War video games are during the Iraq War, know that, at least, there’s history behind it.

It’s listed in the International Games Database but seems to have done the slow fade, otherwise.

I’ve made a flickr set of images from Roslindale taken via google streetview. If anyone can find someone doing something really interesting, outlandish or illegal in streetview in the Roslindale area, I’ll put it up and give you a free and genuine Pazzo T-Shirt and maybe some other fine gifts.

Sadly, the pictures seem to have been taken on a Monday afternoon, so action is at a minimum but this is Roslindale unvarnished, unpreposessing and unprepared; the truth of the place as seen by a guy in a car with an automatic camera.

Oh, if you can find definitive evidence of what the photo car looked like (e.g. reflected in a window), you’ll win a signed photo of Brian along with a certificate of authenticity.

Thanks for the heads up to Mr. Josh Glenn.

Google Streetview has meandered down to Rozzie and now shows all of the Square save, interestingly, Birch St (it’s not actually interesting; they only did the major roads). Sadly, it was sort of cloudy that day, so Roslindale will forever look a little blah and missing the nice views of downtown from Metropolitan.

I was pretty struck by the plot keywords for Beowulf on IMDB which include:

* Stabbed In The Eye
* Stabbed In The Arm
* Stabbed In The Leg
* Seduction
* Sliced In Two
* Stabbed In The Shoulder
* Eaten Alive
* Stabbed In The Back
* Crushed Head
* Stabbed In The Chest
* Severed Leg
* Decapitation
* Disembowelment
* Axe In The Head
* Torn In Half
* Burnt Face
* Arm Ripped Off
* Severed Arm
* Fall Off Cliff
* Heart Ripped Out
* Trampled To Death
* Impalement
* Dismemberment
* Spear Through Chest
* Blood Splatter
* Stabbed To Death
* Beaten To Death
* Burned Alive
* Split In Two
* Cannibalism
* Person On Fire
* Throat Slitting
* Severed Head
* Stabbed In The Head
* Stabbed In The Throat
* Stabbed In The Side

How is this movie not more popular? How is it PG-13?

The best part is you can click on a plot keyword and it will pull up a filterable list of other movies. Like severed heads? There are 401 movies with that keyword. Like severed heads and female nudity? An impressive 121 choices. Severed head, person on fire and fall from height? 17 choices; not bad. You could really maximize your movie watching this way.

So, again, the object is to eat everything food related in The Canterbury Tales. If there is no specific dish mentioned (which is common) I’ll pick something representative from a period cookbook. There are a few spots where Chaucer used character’s revolting eating or cooking habits (Roger Hodge’s cook is said to stuff his geese with flies that infest his shop) to make a point; I’m going to skip those unless I find one that’s really funny and non-lethal. I’ll use only cookbooks from before 1500 to give myself some leeway - mostly I’ll be relying on the 1393 treatise The Forme of Cury, written by Richard the Second’s (the monarch during most of Chaucer’s career) Master Cooks and a group of manuscripts known as An Early 13th Century Northern European Cookbook. Where possible I’ll borrow from the much more humane The Art of Cooking, by Martino de Como sometime before 1474 (when it was borrowed by Platina and published in his De Honesta Voluptate). In addition to having some actual instructions, it also doesn’t tend to require multiple boilings - this from The Forme of Cury (the liberal modernization of the Middle English is my own):

Lampreys in Galantyne:
Take lampreys and kill them with vinegar, white wine and salt, scald them in water and slice them a little at the navel. Take the blood and guts out the end and carefully reserve the blood [there’s a lot of blood reserving in this cookbook]. Roast them and keep the leavings. Stuff with vinegar, crusts of bread, ginger, flour, powdered cloves, raisins and the blood and leavings, strain it, salt it and boil it. Serve on a plate

I hope Chaucer doesn’t mention lamprey - do they still eat those over in the Great Lakes region? I still remember the giant lamprey crawling out of Lake Eerie in that Vonnegut story, which had become too polluted even for it, and eating one of the main characters.

Anyway, if Chaucer could crib half of The Canterbury Tales from Boccaccio, I can certainly venture down to Italy to find some recipes with at least general directions and less blood saving. I’ll only drink proper period beverages with the meals - wine if mentioned, otherwise ale which is mentioned a lot. Water is for washing and in the Middle Ages, not even for that.

I will also, keeping Molecular Gastronomy in mind, try and report back on some of the nuances of eating Chaucer: How do you keep the chicken bits from sinking to the bottom of the blanc mange (do ground chicken and pulled chicken have different buoyancy to mass ratios?)? Do geese really attract more flies than other fowl? If you reserve the blood from bloodsucking lamprey, whose blood are you reserving? With the new Massachusetts laws allowing me to shoot nuisance “resident” geese, should I just eat one of them? We’ll find out.