Eating Medieval Art: "Tartys in Applis"

In talking about my food preferences and how they are shaping this project, I neglected to mention one thing: I have a major sweet tooth. I love chocolate, but it's off the table for this project since it's a New World product. I'm also a big fan of baked fruit desserts and so, when I saw a recipe for an apple tart in Plyen Delit, I knew I would have to give it a try.

The original recipe reads: "Tak gode applys & gode spycis & figs & reysons & perys, & wan they arn wel ybrayd colour wyth safroun wel & do yt in a cofyn, & do yt forth to bake wel." I substituted prunes for figs, because I had some in my cupboard, and I didn't use any pears, because I didn't want to wait for them to get ripe. For apples, I used Granny Smiths, as my favorite for baking in general. The most unusual part of the recipe was the direction that the fruits be "wel ybrayd:" the authors of Plyen Delit translate that as chopping them up together in the food processor. The result was similar to a mincemeat pie, but with no meat.

The recipe didn't give directions for the pie crust, so I had to decide on a crust for myself. I used this Smitten Kitchen pie crust and was very happy with the result. My major issue with most apple pies is the soggy, flabby, mushy bottom crust. This one was firm and light and flaky. The only real difference I could see from pie crust recipes I've used in the past was not using the food processor for mixing in the butter. I think Smitten Kitchen is right that using the processor always immediately over-processes but the butter, chopping it up much too finely and mixing it in much too evenly. Doing it by hand kept the butter chunks much bigger - they were visible in the dough - and much more irregular in their distribution. It also takes longer and requires more effort, but the results were worth it for me and I'm going to continue doing it that way.

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The Virgin at Chartres, White Supremacy, and Medieval Studies

Medieval Studies blew up online this past weekend when a Rachel Fulton Brown, an Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Chicago (my graduate institution, although I did not study with her), published a few pieces on her blog aimed at Dorothy Kim (an Assistant Professor at Vassar College, who I know from the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship) for her insistence that medieval studies as a field needs to grapple with the way its materials have been and are currently being used by white supremacists to support their ideology and that those of us who teach medieval materials need to signal our rejection of white supremacist beliefs to our students. While the first post begins (and the second continues) an attack on Kim, the bulk of it is given over to an argument about the Virgin Mary that is framed around a famous window from Chartres Cathedral, known as Notre Dame de la Belle Verriere (our lady of the beautiful window). According to Fulton Brown, th

À mon seul désir

This post has been brewing for a while - since my Spring Break trip to Paris. It springs from one of my visits to the Cluny during that trip, when I ended up in the Unicorn tapestries room. I've been in there before of course, if only because it is the only air-conditioned space in the museum. My first month-long trip summer trip to Paris I took in July instead of June and it was hot (and a little smelly). I was spending my afternoons in museums looking at Virgin and Child statues and most of the Cluny's are gathered in a gallery right next to the tapestries room, so I would duck in there to sit in the a.c. for a bit whenever I got just too uncomfortable. On this most recent trip, in March, it was freezing cold and I got routed through the room because that space with the Virgins was briefly closed for some reason. And for some other reason I was struck by the panel above, sometimes labelled as the Lady and the Unicorn. Struck not so much by its imagery, as by its

Paris, patterns, textures, textiles: A photo-essay

I head home from Paris tomorrow. I've done a lot of work here: finished drafting an article and wrote my talk for Kalamazoo. But I've also taken a lot of photographs of the city and done a lot of knitting, producing two now of these yarn-bombs for lamp posts (I'll install the second tomorrow morning before heading to the airport. It was intended to replace the first, but since it's actually still there, the second will have to go on a different lamp post). This blog post is meant to tie those last two pursuits together, very visually. It's also, then, a meditation on one of the things I love about this city; the textures, the patterns, and the details in the architecture, the street furniture, and the street itself. Yarn-bomb in the Place Louis Aragon on the Ile St. Louis. Crosswalk on the Rue St. Antoine. Yarn-bomb detail. Detail of wrought-iron work on a tomb in Pere Lachaise. Yarn-bomb detail.

Mostly Medieval:Images and Reflections

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