Monthly Archives: February 2015

To convert White Wine into Red

Updated on February 21, 2015 by Rose Lerner

Hi all! Huzzah, this is my first post as an official Risky! I am so happy to be here. 😀

The hero of my current WIP Listen to the Moon (readers of Sweet Disorder may remember him as Nick’s pun-hating valet Toogood) has recently taken a job as butler in a vicarage. Now, one of the tasks of a butler is to oversee the wine cellar. As The Complete Servant (published in 1825 by husband-and-wife butler/housekeeper duo Samuel and Sarah Adams) puts it:

The keys of the wine and ale cellars are specially kept by him, and the management of the wine, the keeping of the stock book, and also of ale in stock, or in brewing, are in his particular charge. This duty he generally performs in the morning before he is dressed to receive company, and he then brings out such wine as is wanted for the day’s use. It is his duty to fine* wine as it comes in the pipe**, and to superintend the bottling, sealing it himself, and disposing it in bins so as to know its age and character. While these duties and those of brewing are in hand, he leaves the parlour and waiting duties to the under butler and footman.

* Fining is the process of adding stuff to wine that attaches itself to unwanted particles in the wine; they can then be removed together or allowed to sink to the bottom of the keg or cask. It ensures your wine doesn’t look like this:

Photo Credit: Monica Yichoy via Wikimedia Commons.

** A pipe is a traditional English wine cask size, equal to about a hundred and twenty-five gallons, or half a tun.

I wanted to write a scene set in the wine cellar, but I know almost nothing about wine except that I like to drink it. So I checked out some of the helpful tips and recipes in The Complete Servant.

I loved the long list of equipment “To Fit up a Cellar of Wines and Spirits.” Then I tried reading some methods of fining wine.

To fine Port Wine

Take the whites and shells of eight fresh eggs, beat them in a wooden can or pail, with a whisk, till it becomes a thick froth; then add a little wine to it, and whisk it again[…]If the weather be warmish, add a pint of fresh-water sand to the finings. Stir it well about; after which put in the finings, stirring it for five minutes; put in the can of wine, leaving the bung out for a few hours, that the froth may fall: then bung it up, and in eight or ten days it will be fine and fit for bottling.

Ewwwww!

To improve White Wines

If the wine have an unpleasant taste, rack off one half; and to the remainder add a gallon of new milk, a handful of bay-salt, and as much rice; after which take a staff, beat them well together for half an hour, and fill up the cask, and when rolled well about, stillage it, and in a few days it will be much improved.

If the white wine is foul and has lost its colour, for a butt or pipe take a gallon of new milk, put it into the cask, and stir it well about with a staff; and when it has settled, put in three ounces of isinglass made into a jelly, with a quarter of a pound of loaf sugar scraped fine, and stir it well about. On the day following, bung it up, and in a few days it will be fine and have a good color.

Well. Now I was well and truly grossed out! Truly, the past is another country, I thought.

Shows what I know. While inorganic finings are also widely used these days, Wikipedia says: “The most common organic compounds used include egg whites, casein derived from milk, gelatin and isinglass obtained from the bladders of fish.”

Yes indeed. Even dried oxblood powder (a popular traditional fining for red wine) is not entirely a thing of the past. Yes, it had already mostly gone out of fashion when it was banned by the EEC in 1997 due to concerns about mad cow disease–but even after that some wineries were caught breaking the ban!

In theory, only trace amounts of finings remain in the final bottled wine. But although I could find no anecdotal evidence of folks allergic to milk having a reaction to drinking white wine, in 2007 the Scientific Panel on Dietetic Products, Nutrition and Allergies of the European Food Safety Agency published their finding “that milk and milk products used in winemaking may trigger allergic responses”! (A helpful blog post on the subject is here.)

I think the tip that horrified me the most, though, was this one:

To convert White Wine into Red

Pour four ounces of turnesole rags* into an earthen vessel, and pour upon them a pint of boiling water; cover the vessel close, and leave it to cool; strain off the liquor, which will be of a fine deep red inclining to purple. A small portion of this colours a large quantity of wine. This tincture may either be made in brandy, or mixed with it, or else made into a syrup, with sugar, for keeping.

* “A violet-blue or purple colouring matter, obtained from the plant Crozophora tinctoria, formerly much used for colouring jellies, confectionery, wines, etc., and later as a pigment[…]Coarse linen rags are steeped in the juice, and then dried and exposed in vats over an ammoniacal mixture; hence the designation turnsole in rags.” –The Oxford English Dictionary

In those countries which do not produce the tingeing grape which affords a blood-red juice, wherewith the wines of France are often stained, in defect of this, the juice of elderberries is used, and sometimes log-wood is used at Oporto.

Now that’s just cheating.

Posted in Food, Research | 11 Replies

Peninsular War road trip

Updated on February 19, 2015 by susanna

As I think I’ve mentioned here on several occasions, this summer Mr Fraser, our daughter (who turns 11 in two months), and I will be going to Europe this summer, among other things to attend the bicentennial reenactment of the Battle of Waterloo.

We’re going to be there for nearly four weeks, so there will be far more to our trip than just Waterloo. While some of the trip has nothing to do with my Regency research interests–e.g. the five nights we’ll be spending in a cottage in the Dordogne River valley near Sarlat–we’re planning a week in Spain that’s turning into The Frasers’ Excellent Roman Ruins and Peninsular War Battlefield Road Trip Adventure.

I’m still researching the details, but at this point it looks like I’ll get to feed my Wellington obsession at the following sites:

Vitoria, where in June 1813 Wellington trounced Jourdan and the British army captured the French baggage train, laden with treasure Joseph Bonaparte and his courtiers had seized from Madrid–the incident that opens my 2013 novella, A Dream Defiant.

Salamanca, where Wellington, who is primarily regarded as a brilliant defensive general, proved himself pretty damn capable on the attack as well. As Maximilien Foy, one of the French generals there, put it:

“This battle is the most cleverly fought, the largest in scale, the most important in results, of any that the English have won in recent times. It brings up Lord Wellington’s reputation almost to the level of that of Marlborough. Up to this day we knew his prudence, his eye for choosing good positions, and the skill with which he used them. But at Salamanca he has shown himself a great and able master of manoeuvring. He kept his dispositions hidden nearly the whole day: he allowed us to develop our movement before he pronounced his own: he played a close game: he utilized the oblique order in the style of Frederick the Great.”

Badajoz, site of a bloody siege and storming followed by brutal and shameful pillaging in April 1812–and another battled that’s shown up in my writing, in my 2010 debut, The Sergeant’s Lady.

Talavera, the 1809 victory that first raised Wellington to the nobility as a viscount.

And last but very far from least, we’ll end up in Madrid, where we’ll visit the Prado and I’ll be able to see many of Goya’s works, including ones like the above illustrating the horror and brutality of war–something I try my best never to forget even as I write adventurous romances with soldier heroes.

I’m more thrilled than I can say that this trip I’ve been planning and dreaming of for a decade is now just a few short months away, and I can hardly wait to come back with pictures and stories to fill months of blog posts!

Posted in History | Tagged Peninsular War, Spain, Susanna Fraser, travel, Waterloo, Wellington | 7 Replies

First Post as a “Risky”

Updated on February 18, 2015 by Isobel Carr

Comfort, 1815

I’ve been mulling over ideas for my first “official” post as a Risky, and in the end, I’m falling back on clothing (shocking, I know, LOL!). I thought I’d do a post about “risky” clothing, or drawers. After all, what’s more risky than a risqué garment that we now think of as a necessity!

Knee-length drawers are reported to have been worn by women as early as the turn of the 19th century, but they were considered fast and unladylike, and were not commonly adopted from what I can tell. I’ve consulted with a lot of costume historians and museum curators over the years, and none of them see them as a common garment in the records, household accounts, or as extant garments before the Victorian period, really.

Gilray,1810

They had a split crotch, usually being made up of two entirely separate legs on a drawstring waistband. An illustration from 1810 (included below) shows a lady wearing them, so it can be construed that they were somewhat accepted by then, but I do wonder as other images in the series seem to concentrate on highlighting the more deceptive aspects of a woman’s toilette (such as wigs).

Woven linen drawers, c. 1820

The extant pairs we DO have from the Regency all seem to date from the 1820s. They have a split crotch, usually being made up of two entirely separate legs on a drawstring waistband.

An illustration from 1810 shows a lady wearing them, so it can be construed that they were becoming more accepted by then, but I would still hazard that they were not a universal.

Exhibition Stare Case, 1811 Click for a larger image!

And I would make that guess because of other images that clearly show them as not being worn (such as Comfort at the top of the post and Exhibition Stare Case, left).

So it’s always worth remembering that the daring, fast, risky move in the Regency period was to put on a pair of drawers. I’d love to see a book where the hero is scandalized by discovering his lady love’s undies, and I fully expect that if anyone can write that book, it’s one of the marvelous women I now share this blog with.

I look forward to seeing what everyone comes up with to talk about in 2015!

Posted in Clothing, History, Isobel Carr, Regency, Research, Risky Regencies | 8 Replies

Newcomer!

Updated on February 15, 2015 by Mary Blayney

Three cheers for the Risky Regencies and how exciting that I can count myself one of them as of today. Thanks to the long time members for thinking of me and making this happen. Now I have an outlet for the research that never gets used, for research that is so great I need to share more than the mention it gets in a book, to discuss story concepts, release of new books, both ePublished and from legacy publishers, and the general commenting back and forth that makes this blog one of the best.

But first I want to tell you how and why I became a writer of Regency set romance. When I started writing I wanted to write books with happy endings and romance was the only place that welcomed an upbeat ending. (It was more than 25 years ago) I started with contemporaries when Harlequin and Silhouette were in competition, in what I think of as the golden days of romance.

After selling two books in quick succession (FATHER CHRISTMAS is now available as an ebook) I sold nothing, zip, zero for twelve years. I wrote and submitted proposals and the occasional complete manuscript and shook my head, or yelled, or cried at every rejection. Then one day a good friend of mine suggested that I write a regency. My answer was, “But regencies don’t make any money.” And her reply (with exasperation edging her voice,) “Mary, if you wanted to make money you would have written to the market for the last twelve years.”

Oh. Good point. For me it’s always been about sharing the story. Making money is a wonderful fringe benefit. So I finished the regency that I had started years before and sold it within three months. And eventually I made money writing series for Kensington, Bantam and Berkley.

Why has it been such a good fit? I was a history major in college. For me history is crammed full of stories waiting to be told.

Even more important: the Regency is, I think, the first period in history that 21st century people can truly relate to. The early nineteenth century is when the pendulum begins to swing from doing what is good for the community to what is good for the individual. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century men and women considered, for the first time, marrying for love rather than for what a marriage could add to the family in terms of wealth, land or social advancement.

Add to that the war with Napoleon and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and the period from 1800 to 1825 is a treasure trove of ideas and inspiration.

Why you love reading (or writing) regencies? What sort of stories do you enjoy the most?

Posted in Risky Regencies | 16 Replies

On Going Home

Updated on February 13, 2015 by Elena Greene

I’ve been trying to keep showing a cheerful front to the world here in this blog, Facebook and elsewhere, but it’s time for a confession. I haven’t done any creative writing in many months.

I’m not ready to go into the reasons at this point. I can only say that I’m facing a challenge bigger than any I’ve encountered thus far, including my husband’s stroke. The good news is that I have learned a lot from that crisis and am using it all now. I am no longer looking for a light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve also discovered that I can light my own way.

My instincts (which have been serving me very well lately and I should have listened to before) are telling me to focus my energy on solving the current crisis and that it is OK to take a break from writing. Sometimes writing is a solace, but pushing myself to write now—even if I had time—would be like a runner trying to train on a broken leg.

I am doing is letting go of the guilt imposed by internal and external critics and trusting myself. I know how to be mindful, how to tell I am being too hard or too easy on myself, how to ask the right questions and find out what I need more of, what I need less of, not only to get through the crisis but to thrive afterwards.

I think we all can do this. As Jane Austen wrote, “We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.”

In order to learn to attend to that guide, I’ve been rereading Women Who Run with the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. She writes about women’s need to “go home”, where “Home is a sustained mood or sense that allows us to experience feelings not necessarily sustained in the mundane world: wonder, vision, peace, freedom from worry, freedom from demands, freedom from constant clacking. All these treasures from home are meant to be cached in the psyche for later use in the topside world.” One can “go home” many ways, including going into nature, praying, meditating, making art.

She also writes “if a woman doesn’t go when it’s her time to go, the hairline crack in her soul/psyche becomes a ravine, and the ravine becomes a roaring abyss.” I know from experience that this is true. So while I’m dealing with some crazy-making issues, I’m also doing my Morning Pages (a type of journaling taught in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron), meditating at every day and finding pockets of time to do smaller projects that sustain my creativity while demanding less time than the writing.

I am not leaving the Riskies, as our new schedule of posting just once a month allows me enough time to do the rest of the work I must do before I can write again. And I will get back to writing. The river hasn’t dried up; it’s only gone underground for a while.

Do you “go home”? How?

Elena

Posted in Writing | Tagged Clarissa Pinkola Estes, creativity, Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way, Women Who Run With the Wolves | 15 Replies