Look, it’s a snazzy new website! Check it out: www.amoffenwanger.com. You can also get there by clicking the “Editing Services” tab above. And the “Blog” tab on that website links back to here. There’s even a new email address that goes with it, editor@amoffenwanger.com. Cool, eh?
Spread the word – if you or anyone else you know is in need of a wordy nitpicker, here I am!
And that’s Life, the Universe, and a Brand-new Website. Go and share!
In Chapter 5 of Cat and Mouse, Catriona learns how to bake sourdough bread. It’s been a while since I’d done it myself, but I recently got some sourdough starter from a friend, so I had to give it a try. It turned out great. Here’s what it looked like in my kitchen, with relevant passages from Cat’s process by way of explanation. Of course, my dishes are ordinary boring plastics, not lovely stoneware crockery like Cat’s, and I have to admit to using electric appliances for both the kneading and the baking, but following Cat’s method you should come out with about the same results. (Oh, and don’t worry, there aren’t any spoilers for the book in this passage. Other than that Cat learns to bake, but I’ve already told you that.) So here we go:
“Very well. Sourdough first.”
Ouska picked up a stoneware crock from the shelf above the fireplace, brought it over to the heavy deal table in the middle of the kitchen, and took a large brown mixing bowl from the top of the Welsh dresser. The dish, about twenty inches in diameter at the top and eight or ten inches high, was a heavy pottery piece; Cat smiled as she recognised her husband’s handiwork.
She took a look into the sourdough crock. It contained a slightly bubbly-looking slop that looked not unlike the porridge that she had made too runny that morning. “This smells a bit like beer,” she said.
The sponge after rising overnight
“That’s the sourdough working,” said Ouska. “Sometimes I’ve used some of Uncle’s beer leaven if he had any extra; it’s much quicker to make bread with that, it rises faster. But this works, and it’s simple. Usually he needs the leaven for his beer.”
“Leaven? Oh, I think we call it yeast where I’m from. So you don’t use that then? I thought you had to have it for making bread.”
“No, there’s enough leaven in the air. But you have to catch it and feed it before you can use it; I’ll show you later.” Ouska poured some of the sourdough into the bowl, then took the salt cellar from the cupboard and sprinkled a few spoonfuls into the bowl. She pointed Cat to the flour bin that stood in the corner. “We need about two scoops of flour,” she said. Cat opened the bin and saw a large wooden scoop stuck in the top of the wholemeal flour that filled the bin halfway.
“That’s a nice bin,” she said, “is it new?”
“Yes, we just had it built. …” Ouska said as she brought the big mixing bowl over to the bin. Cat dumped a couple of measures of flour in.
[…]
[Ouska] put the mixing bowl back on the table and rolled up the sleeves of her blouse. “Now. This is where the real work begins,” she said as she plunged her hands into the flour in the bowl and began to stir the mess with both hands. “Here, give it a try,” she said, rubbing the sticky dough off her fingers.
Cat stuck her hands in the sticky batter. “Ooh, gooey!” she said, and squished the dough through her fingers. “This is a good workout for the hands!” She mixed and stirred until none of the dry flour was left. Ouska sprinkled in additional flour until the dough was no longer sticky.
“Now, move the bowl over a bit,” said Ouska. She scooped a handful of flour from the bin and sprinkled it on the surface of the table, then took the lump of dough from the bowl and smacked it on the table. “Ever done any kneading before?”
The kneaded dough
“A bit,” said Cat. She grasped the dough and started rolling it towards her.
Ouska chuckled. “You’re kneading like a potter’s wife,” she said. “You don’t need to make a nice little roll of it like your man does with his clay; with bread, it doesn’t matter how you handle it, so long as you do it hard.” She tore the lump of dough in half and showed Cat what she meant.
“Oh, I get it!” said Cat, and fell to it with vigour. “Phew, this is hard work,” she said, “but satisfying!” She lifted the dough lump and smacked it on the table so hard the crockery on the dresser rattled.
“Hah, well done,” said Ouska. “It will rise nicely if you keep that up.”
“So the harder you whack it, the better it gets?”
“That’s about the size of it,” replied the older woman.
“So, Aunt,” said Cat, pummeling, squishing, and pounding the dough, “there was something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“Yes?” said Ouska, looking up from her kneading.
“You know, being an Unissima—do you sometimes have special dreams?”
“Dreams?” The older woman took Cat’s piece of dough, smacked the two lumps back together, kneaded them into a ball, and put it in a bowl on the warming shelf by the stove. “That’ll need to rise for a few hours now,” she said. “What kind of dreams do you mean?”
The dough after rising for about three hours
[…]
“There,” she said, handing Cat a jug, “we need to feed the sourdough. Get it about half full of warm water, would you?”
Cat collected the water from the tap in the bathroom behind the kitchen. […]
Ouska mixed the water with some more flour into the remaining sourdough in the crock … [and] put the sourdough crock on the warming shelf beside the mixing bowl. “Now,” she said, “by tomorrow it will have worked through nicely, and we can make another batch of bread if we need to. So that’s all there is to bread making, other than rising and baking it.
The shaped bread ready to rise for the second time
[…]
“Okay,” said Cat, “so let me write down the bread recipe. […] About three or four cups of sourdough?”
“Yes, about that. And as much flour to start with, and then however much it takes to make a firm dough. Don’t forget to write down the salt; it’s a mite bland without it.”
Cat copied it out.
“How long does it need to rise?” she asked.
“Oh, a few hours. Until it’s about twice as big as it was.” Let rise until doubled in bulk, Cat wrote.
“Then what?”
“Then punch it down, shape it, rise it again, and bake it.”
Fresh out of the oven
“For how long, and how hot?”
“Well, at middling heat, until it’s ready—”
Cat snorted. “Yeah, right. You sound like my grandmother. I’d ask her how to do something, and she would say ‘Oh, it’s easy, you just do it!’”
Ouska smiled. “Well, then, perhaps half an hour or so. You have to keep turning it in the oven; I’ll show you.”
Cat finished her recipe sheet: Bake for half an hour at moderate h-
“Drat!” she said, “ink blot! And I was doing so well, too!”
Yes, it tastes as good as it looks.
Now, if you want to know what the deal is with those dreams Cat is talking about, you’ll just have to read the book, won’t you?
Life, the Universe, and Sourdough Bread. We had it with French Onion Soup – maybe Cat’s family did too?
We went to see the new Jane Austen movie that just came out. Oh, you hadn’t heard about it? You’re wondering what it is – another Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, maybe Northanger Abbey? Nope, nope and nope. It’s Love and Friendship. What, you don’t know that one? Well, neither does anyone else. That’s because it’s made after an unpublished novella called Lady Susan. Oh, you’ve never read that one either? Yeah, neither had I, until this morning.
Actually, “Love and Friendship” is a legitimate Austen title – it belongs to one of her other pieces of juvenilia, and they cribbed it for this Lady Susan adaptation. Except that Austen spelled it “Love and Freindship” (she seems to have had a bit of a problem with the “i before e except after c” rule). And no, I haven’t read that one yet either; it’s on the TBR pile.
Lady Susan is also a very early work (although not quite “juvenilia”), from ca. 1794 when Austen was 18, before she even wrote the earliest version of S&S and P&P. There’s good reasons it never got published – apart from being short (60 pages in the edition I have), compared to her finished works it’s quite crude and unsophisticated. This being Austen, of course her crude & unsophisticated teenage pieces still beat other writers’ works to flinders, but it’s noticeably simpler and more satirical than anything she wrote later. It’s also an epistolary novel, i.e. it’s told in letters, not narration, a form that Austen abandoned entirely later on.
To give you a brief synopsis (Spoiler Warning!), the novel is about the eponymous Lady Susan Vernon, who is, to put it quite frankly, a bitch of the first water. Lady Susan, a widow, goes to stay with her brother-in-law and his family, where she proceeds to make her sister-in-law’s brother, Reginald De Courcy, fall in love with her against his better judgement, while still keeping the married Mr Mannering on one string and the dimwitted Sir James Martin on another. Actually, the latter she intends to force on her daughter Frederica, a shy girl who is terrified of her and can’t stand Sir James. We learn about all this primarily through Lady Susan’s letters to her friend Alicia, and those of Mrs Vernon (the sister-in-law) to her mother Mrs De Courcy. Lady Susan is a manipulative, immoral deceiver, mean as can be to her poor daughter (who, of course, is also in love with Reginald De Courcy). Fortunately for the upright and honourable folk in the story, Lady Susan is found out, her machinations are stopped, and the tale ends with the promise of a happily-ever-after for all deserving parties.
If the storyline of “Shy girl is bullied by an authority figure, has an unwanted suitor thrust on her, and is in love with an honourable man while having to watch him fall prey to a seductress” sounds familiar, it’s because Austen recycled it later on. In fact, Lady Susan is a Proto-Mansfield Park. But here, the characters are flat as pancakes, and we see the story not through the eyes of the put-upon young girl, but those of the wicked woman who, in this version, is both bully and seductress. There are elements of this story in several of Austen’s later characters and storylines. Lady Susan’s two-faced-ness and lying letters crop back up in Isabella Thorpe of Northanger, her charm and beauty as well as deception of an honest man in Mansfield‘s Mary Crawford, her bullying in Mrs Norris. Frederica Vernon is not unlike Fanny Price; Reginald like Edmond. There’s even a very slight touch of her manipulativeness in Emma.
The latter comparison might not have occurred to me were it not for the fact that Kate Beckinsale played Emma back in 1996 – and now she’s brought Lady Susan to life on the screen. The movie is some lovely eye candy for lovers of period drama. Quite appropriately, it’s set in the late 18th century, with poufed-up hairdos with single curls trailing over white shoulders; tightlaced, busked and panniered silk dresses in all colours of the rainbow; and swirling many-caped greatcoats that accentuate the broad shoulders of the manly and handsome gentlemen (So manly! So swirly! So great-coated!).
The translation from epistolary novel to film is fairly successful. The screen writers introduce a couple of extra characters for Lady Susan to monologue at instead of putting those lines in a letter, or have the characters actually meet and talk to one another instead of communicating the same information in writing. However, in a few spots the attempts to stay as faithful to the text of the novella as possible makes for, quite frankly, somewhat boring viewing. It might be that I’m extra-tired today, but I found myself getting sleepy in places through yet another monologue (which has to be a first – I never fall asleep in the movie theatre, it’s usually far too exciting). But this is a minor complaint.
The changes that the film makers do make to the plot seem reasonable – some events are moved around or arranged differently to make for a better flow on screen; some characters and happenings are added to the story for the sake of exposition. There is one notable instance towards the end of the film where an event is made up of whole cloth that is a little flash of brilliance on the part of the film makers – and I’m not going to tell you what it is, because I enjoyed it so much I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s a case of “It’s not in the book, but it should be.”
And that’s not sacrilege, presuming to improve on Austen – she obviously felt herself that Lady Susan could be better, because she did. Improve the story, that is, by taking some of its elements and working them into her later, published works, while leaving Lady Susan in the drawer. It was just the warm-up – but it’s an Austen nonetheless.
Life, the Universe, and Lady Susan turned into Love and Friendship. Oh, if you want to know what that little bit at the end is, go read the book, and then watch the movie. It’s worth it.
As of 2:30 this afternoon, I’m a Canadian citizen. Finally! Almost twenty-seven years after immigrating, thirty years after first setting foot in the country, finally I got to sing “Oh Canada” without feeling like a tiny bit of a fraud. Because now Canada, at long last, is my country.
I don’t know if you understand how big a deal this is. You see, I fell in love with this country, back in that Expo Summer of ’86 when I first came over for a visit. I loved it so much, I came back – and that time met a man to fall in love with, who just coincidentally became my ticket into the country. We made a home here, we had children, I dropped my German accent – I was, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from my Canadian neighbours. Except for that one small detail: I was not a real Canadian. Every election time that came around, it bothered me more and more that I had no say in what was happening here, in this country where I felt so much at home, but still was just an immigrant.
Because, you see, I love Canada – but I also still love my first home, the place I came from. The new love did not replace the old, it was added to it. And Germany, for many years, would not permit its citizens to take on a second citizenship. If you chose to take another citizenship, you had to give up the German. And that I was not ready to do.
But then, they eased up on the rules. And then eased up on them even more, so that last spring, after filling out much paperwork and paying large processing fees, I got permission to keep my German citizenship if I took Canadian. I don’t think it took me more than a few days after I came back with that document from the German Consulate before I had my Canadian citizenship application in the mail.
In January, I took my citizenship test, and then just a few weeks ago I got the invitation to take my Oath of Citizenship. So today, I got to swear at the Queen. I mean, swear allegiance to the Queen, that’s what I meant! That’s right, in Canada, we swear our allegiance to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada – not the flag, or the constitution, or the country; the Queen. The invitation said we could bring a holy book to swear on if we wanted, so I briefly considered bringing a copy of Anne of Green Gables, or better yet, The Canadian Oxford Dictionary, but then I thought they might kick me out for not taking this seriously – which I did, I really did.
So a Mountie resplendent in red serge opened the ceremony, and after some solemn words from the official, we all stood with our right hand raised, reciting the oath (in the back of my mind, I’m thinking “What if you’ve got your right hand in a sling, or you’re quadriplegic? And isn’t this dextrocentric – what about lefties, wouldn’t raising their left hand be more significant?”). We swore to be loyal to the Queen and her heirs and successors (that would be Charles, William and George, even though we didn’t say so), and to faithfully uphold the laws of Canada and fulfil our duties as Canadian Citizens. We said it in English first, and then in French, which almost gave me a fit of the giggles, because I don’t know French, and neither did the gentleman officiating, so he stumbled his way through giving us the sounds to repeat which were almost entirely meaningless to me and probably a lot of others there as well. But, Canada being bilingual, we had to at least make a show of trying, right?
Then we filed to the front, where there was a table set up on which we actually signed the oath – not unlike signing the marriage register at a wedding – and we got to step three feet over and were handed our Citizenship Certificate. A row of handshakes, file back to the seat, listen to a few short speeches. One of them was from the representative of the MP for my riding – and that’s when it hit me: for the first time, this was the representative of my MP, my riding. I no longer have to have this little blocking feature in the back of my mind that says, “Yeah, but I don’t get to vote for you,” because now, I do.
And then we stood and faced the flag (the Mountie was saluting), and sang “Oh Canada”. And I’m proud to report that I made it all the way through without choking up; my voice only got wobbly once, and I didn’t actually cry.
So now finally this country that I’ve loved for thirty years, have called home for nearly twenty-seven, truly is my home. My home and – well, not native, but chosen land. It’s a red-letter day – a red-and-white letter day, with a little maple leaf in the middle.
Life, the Universe, and at long last, Canadian Citizenship. I love this country.
This spring, a patch of peas sprang up in one of my garden beds. I didn’t ask for them to be there, they just showed up. I have a suspicion that they came from one of my attempts to grow pea shoots in the winter in a tray on the counter; the leftovers got dumped in the compost, and that’s probably where they ended up, in that garden bed.
So now they’re blooming, and yesterday I made a salad with a head of lettuce from the garden, and just for fun decided to toss in a few pea blossoms (or peaseblossoms, if you want to go Shakespearean). No, Nick Bottom, I didn’t add Mustardseed, Cobweb or Moth, sorry.
The Offspring were of mixed opinions on the matter – actually, most of them didn’t eat the blossoms, just the lettuce. The one that did, though, really enjoyed them. Pea blossoms taste like fresh green peas (as do pea shoots). Edible flowers are lots of fun, although I do understand why people would be weirded out at seeing a bouquet on top of their lettuce.
Anyway, in case you’re interested, I thought I’d share my salad dressing recipe. It’s a basic yogurt vinaigrette (well, actually, not vinaigrette, as it’s not got vinegar in it – so is it a limonette?).
SALAD DRESSING
-1/4 c plain yogurt
-1 good squirt of lemon juice (let’s say 1 Tbsp)
-a glug of salad oil (or 2 Tbsp)
-salt & pepper to taste (or 1/4 tsp each)
-you can add 1/2 tsp prepared mustard, like dijon (if you want your Mounsieur Mustardseed), and any or all chopped fresh or dry herbs that strike your fancy. This one has chopped parsley, dill, lemon thyme, chives and green onions, because that’s what I happened to have in the garden.
-whisk together or shake in a small jar or gravy shaker. Put in the bottom of the salad bowl, toss lettuce in it (or pour over thinly sliced cucumbers or any other salad veg, toss). Top with whatever edible flowers you happen to have on hand. Serve immediately.
So there you have it, salad with peaseblossoms. As Nick Bottom would say:
BOTTOM: Your name, honest gentleman?
PEASEBLOSSOM: Peaseblossom.
BOTTOM: I pray you, commend me to Mistress Squash, your
mother, and to Master Peascod, your father. Good
Master Peaseblossom, I shall desire you of more
acquaintance too. (Midsummer Night’s Dream, III, 1)
Life, the Universe, and Peaseblossoms. What’s in a salad? A salad, of any other veg, would taste as nice…
This spring, a patch of peas sprang up in one of my garden beds. I didn’t ask for them to be there, they just showed up. I have a suspicion that they came from one of my attempts to grow pea shoots in the winter in a tray on the counter; the leftovers got dumped in the compost, and that’s probably where they ended up, in that garden bed.
SALAD DRESSING
