Off the Beaten Track: Getting Around, Ancient Style

Novel Adventurers are very happy to welcome back our guest blogger today. Gary Corby is the author of The Pericles Commission and The Ionia Sanction, the first two books in a murder mystery series set in the ancient world. The third book, Sacred Games, will be released in May 2013.  He lives in Sydney, Australia, with one wife, two daughters, four guinea pigs, and two budgies. You can catch him on his blog at GaryCorby.com, on twitter, and on GoodReads. 

It's lovely to be back at Novel Adventurers!  Last time I was here I wrote about whether it's possible to get a visa to the ancient world (here).  Because, you see, I write murder mysteries set in ancient Greece.  My heroes are Nicolaos, the elder brother of Socrates, and Diotima, the greatest lady philosopher of her age, who just happened to be Socrates' teacher.  Ancient history is an interesting subject for many people, but for me, it's also a job skill.

That includes knowing how people traveled about.  A lot of us equate rapid and distant travel with the modern world.  It's not true! 

I once took the ferry from Bodrum on the coast of Turkey, to Crete, in the Mediterranean Sea, halfway to Egypt.  (There's an amazing Crusader castle at Bodrum, by the way).  The trip took about the same time as a trireme would have taken, two and a half millennia ago.  

Of course, anyone who's ever traveled on Greek ferries knows that getting to the destination per schedule isn't necessarily part of the ticket.  A more telling example is that the overnight train from Athens to Istanbul is no faster today than a rider with a spare mount could have managed in the ancient world.  The Persians had by then created a system called the King's Messengers, which was a relay system of super-fast riders on quality mounts.  Those guys could move a message from one side of the Persian Empire to the other in three days, and that was the largest empire the world had yet seen.  Three days isn't up to internet speed, but we're talking about written letters, and that sort of time is on a par with a modern postal service.  

If you wanted to travel about, there was no one to stop you.  No passports.  No visas.  No border guards.  (City guards were another matter).  Also, no highway patrol.  If you traveled far from home and got attacked and killed, then your body would be left to rot in some ditch by the road.  No one back home was ever going to know what happened to you.  Nor would locals necessarily care except to complain about the smell as they passed by.  Self-defence skills were at a premium!   Another minor problem was being attacked and enslaved by pirates, or held for ransom.  This actually happened to the famous philosopher Plato.  He was captured on a return trip from Sicily, and his friends had to buy him back.  

The funny thing is, everything I just listed is something that can happen to you today, if you stray into the wrong parts.  

Greek shipping went a considerable distance.  It's a little known fact that the French city of Marseilles was originally the Greek colony of Massalia.  Incredibly, there've been grave goods found in Britain that are almost certainly from Mycenaean Greece.  They're all in Cornwall--at the Rillaton Barrow in fact--so it's likely some Greek trader got his boat past Gibraltar and up the Atlantic coast, and then took off across the English Channel.  The earliest Greek who we know for absolute sure got that far was a fellow called Pytheas, who came from Massalia.  He reported landing on an island called Pritannia.  It's no coincidence that today we call the same place Britannia.  Pytheas continued on to Norway, where he saw the midnight sun.

Going in the other direction, there have been scraps of silk found in the grave of a German warrior dated to 700BC.  That's way early for the Silk Road to be open, but by the time of Nicolaos and Diotima, the road is open at least as far as Persia.  It was therefore possible, in theory, for someone in Nico's time to make it from Britain to China.   And everywhere you went, there'd be different languages, different foods, and wildly different cultures.  Which is all to the good if you happen to be me and writing that period.  I often think that to be an adventurer in that time must have been like living in an epic fantasy.

Comfort for a Cold

By Patricia Winton

When I was about eight years old, I stayed home from school, in bed with the flu. Nothing tasted good. And while I don’t remember my mother trying to tempt me with goodies to make me eat—she isn’t that kind of mother—she did make me potato soup. Somehow, that appealed. In fact, I liked it so much that I wanted it again and again.

Such a simple dish, potato soup. Finely chopped onions sautéed in butter until soft. Potatoes cut into tiny cubes. Simmer these two in water for a while. Salt and pepper to taste. What could be easier?

Yet for me, it evokes warmth and stability and, yes, comfort. Over the years, I’ve tried many variations. Leeks instead of onions with watercress produces traditional French vichyssoise when chilled. Sometimes I’ve added bacon and corn for a lovely chowder. Clams makes it even better. I’ve pureed the basic potato soup to make a smooth concoction and topped it with a dollop of sour cream and chives. I’ve combined the basic recipe with roasted red peppers and cream to produce a first course for a fancy dinner party. I’ve even added braised fennel and bluefish for a hearty main course. But when I’m sick, or want to feel pampered, it’s back to that simple onion, potato, and water recipe.

Once when I worked on a political campaign and stayed with comparative strangers in a city I didn’t know working with people I’d never met before, I came down with a cold. I went “home” at noon, stopping at a grocery store on the way. In the strange kitchen, I cooked my soup and ate some of it, putting the remainder in a plastic container in the fridge. Then I went to bed.

Several hours later, I woke up feeling a bit better and hankering for the leftover soup. In the kitchen I found the householder and her sister preparing their evening meal. They’d been to the grocery store, too, and everything in the fridge had shifted. I searched and searched to no avail. Finally, I asked if anybody had seen the blue plastic bowl. “Oh,” said the householder. “I had to make room for all this food. I opened that bowl and it smelled awful, so I threw it out.”

I still recall the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach almost forty years later. One woman’s comfort is another’s wormwood.

Please join me on alternate Thursdays at Italian Intrigues where I write about all things Italian. Next week I write about pasta and tuna.

Hungry and Far from Home

By Beth Green

Image by Pong/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What do peanut butter, cheese, beans for breakfast, maple syrup, Vegemite and McDonald’s Big Macs have in common? They’re all fixes for homesickness—although the remedy usually only lasts through the final bite.

When I was young my parents and I sailed through the Caribbean and South Pacific on their home-built trimaran. If we were on a longer ocean crossing—more than a few days—my mother and I would play the “what will you eat” game. We’d sit in the cockpit watching for flying fish and describe, in as much detail as possible, the perfect meal for when we reached shore: strawberries, fleshy and red; milk as white as the crest of a breaking wave; crumbly, chocolatey Butterfinger bars. And my favorite, the cold, delicious thickness of a chocolate milkshake.

Since then, my tastes have changed a bit, I suppose (though it’s difficult to imagine a world with too many chocolate milkshakes), and the foodstuff I hanker for most when thinking of the U.S. is that wonderful, juicy, symbol of Americana—the hamburger.

Photo by gt_pann/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

When I lived in the States (I’m based in Southeast Asia now), I nearly never ate a hamburger. I was a slow-food kind of girl. I’d still whip through a McDonald’s drive-thru for a shake and possibly an order of fries, but I kept the hamburger to a once or twice a year maximum.

But somehow, my various transitions around the world have given me a slight obsession with the proper way to prepare a hamburger. This is why it was quite distressing to find that, in China, the word hamburger has been translated to han bao 汉堡 (sometimes doubled to han bao bao) and the term has expanded to include all sandwiches made with buns—even sometimes all sandwiches. Order a hamburger in China, therefore, and occasionally it would be a ham sandwich. Or, ask for a cheeseburger—and get a lonely Kraft single between two slices of sweet white bread. Hold the (fruit-flavored) mayo.

For the record, this is how I like my hamburgers, from the top down:

Toasted buns, topped with sesame seeds. Buns should be fluffy enough to sink your teeth into easily, but not so fragile that the juices from the meat leak through to your fingers.

Frilly lettuce. Not too much. Spinach leaves acceptable.

Image: Sura Nualpradid/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Thick, red slices of tomato. Not those skinny Roma tomatoes that fall out onto your lap when you bite into the burger, either.

Dill pickle slices. Leave your sweet pickles for hot dog relish, thank you.

Mustard. Yellow mustard is OK, but brown mustard is that much better. Hot or fancy mustard gets more points.

Ketchup. Not so much that it drips, but I love that sweet-and-sour taste.

Cheese optional. If put on, it should not have come pre-wrapped and shouldn’t be too drippy when cooked on top of the…

…medium-rare beef patty. I am not a cook, so I can’t truly describe what I like here—but I know it involves high quality beef, finely chopped onion, a good twist or two of freshly ground pepper, and, I believe, some egg yolk.

And, then we’re down to the bun.

Did you enjoy our little game of “what will you eat?”

Your turn!

Bite-Sized Pockets of Love

By Kelly Raftery

A few months into my marriage, I asked a question any new bride might ask, “What is your favorite food?” My Kyrgyz husband answered, “Manty with pumpkin.”  I believe my response might have been something eloquent and deeply meaningful, along the lines of, “What the heck is that?”

Manty is a potsticker.  A lamb potsticker.  Steamed, not fried.  A dumpling.  No more, no less.  With my husband’s explanation of dough wrapped around meat in mind, my younger self set off on a Mission to make the Perfect Manty.  It was more than food, it was my first real challenge as a wife and I would not let it defeat me. 

 

First off, to make the perfect manty, one must obtain a special piece of equipment–a dumpling steamer–basically a large stockpot topped by layers of metal steaming racks.  Next step is the dough.  As a new bride, I doggedly pursued making the perfect manty dough from scratch--flour, water, and a bit of salt.  The dough should be substantial enough to hold the filling in, yet thin enough to not be chewy or tasty of flour.  During an early attempt, my new husband watched his American-brought-up-on-TV-dinners-and-canned-vegetables-wife struggle with the dough, then he abruptly grabbed the rolling pin out of my hands and muttered something along the lines of, “Don’t they teach women anything here?”  Apparently, in Kyrgyzstan making and rolling dough of all kinds is a task mastered by every child.  

Once dough preparation had been appropriately delegated, we moved onto the filling.  Mix together finely chopped lamb, onion, and pumpkin with some salt and pepper.  Then center a small amount of lamb and vegetables on a square of dough, seal the edges with water, make the dumpling look pretty by folding the dough into a nice design on top, place on oiled steaming racks over a big pot of boiling water and leave for 45 minutes.  There you have it – perfect manty!  Except it wasn’t.  

For months, I tried to make the food my husband craved, what reminded him of home and it just never turned out right.  The dough was too thick, the filling was just wrong.  We bought pumpkin after pumpkin after pumpkin, tried different cuts of lamb.  Every weekend for months was filled with experiments in manty-making.  I was determined to get it right, even if it killed me and him both.  And, while it never went that far, I do remember one batch that resulted in us both doubled over with stomach pain and fighting for the bathroom.  Each failed batch of manty seemed to reinforce my own overwhelming feeling of being completely unsuited to being a Kyrgyz wife.  My husband, who had left his whole life behind for me, deserved someone who understood his culture and how to roll dough properly.

One day, not far from Embassy Row in Washington, DC, a wise Kyrgyz woman told me the secret, which was both culinary and linguistic.  The word tykva in Russian is generally translated as “pumpkin” but it means more than that, it means “squash.”  I was trying to make jack ‘o lantern pumpkins into something edible when I really should have been using butternut squash.  That afternoon, we passed a farmer’s market and excitedly picked out a suitably curvy and coffee colored specimen for the next batch.  The manty filling was right for the first time.  Mission successful, first test as wife finally completed, tragedy averted.  

There have certainly been refinements over the years – I have stopped trying to make my version look like a proper Kyrgyz dumpling, favoring substance (i.e. taste) over style, I buy wonton wrappers, skipping the rolling pin and we top ours with a totally non-traditional squirt of Siracha sauce.  

   

On chilly autumn afternoons, you will find my husband and me doling teaspoons full of lamb and vegetables into bite-sized pockets of love, our home filling with heavenly-smelling clouds of warm steam.  The first batch out of the steamer is devoured in minutes and my husband and son eat manty for every meal until they are gone then plead, “More manty, please!”  In our home, love and comfort are measured in manty.     

The Sinful Sushki

They're irresistible. They're addictive.
They're the guilty pleasures of the Russian reality.

By Lina Zeldovich

Oh, sushki!

They're irresistible. They're addictive. They're the guilty pleasures of the Russian reality, its rainy autumns and icy winters, when homes, restaurants, and your friends’ kitchens welcome you in with a cup of hot tea and a bundle of sushki next to it. The Western world binges on chips and popcorn, but Russians are hooked on sushki. Walk into a Russian store anywhere in the world, and you find them. Actually, you’ll find a variety.

Sushki are dry bread crackers – in fact the name comes from the word “sushit” which means "drying out." Circle-shaped with a hole in the middle, they are too low in sugar to earn the sinful title of dessert, but satiating enough to grow into a delightful addiction. Think of them as a cross between bagels and tea biscuits. Or a hybrid of cookies and pretzels. Worse, they aren’t just tasty – they are also fun to play with. You can twirl them on your fingers. And if you’re still in that blissful age of under ten, you can hang them on your ears.

The cousins of American bagels, sushki are smaller, crunchier, and more resilient – keep them in a dry place and they will stay crispy for weeks without ever growing the blue dots of mold. Bite into them too hard and you’re risking breaking your tooth – but that’s part of the fun. The little crunchy fragments with a mild delicate sweetness melt in your mouth oh so satisfyingly. They sneak up on you too: suddenly you realize you’ve eaten half the pack. Some people dip them in milk and others in butter – depending how much they are prepared to sin!

Suddenly you realize
you’ve eaten half the pack!

Besides bagels, in Russia sushki have even more dough cousins of various sizes and “toughness” – bubliki and baranki. They are all members of the same family of bread products made from dough that has been boiled before baking. The dough is made from flour, eggs, water and salt, and then cut and rolled into thin strips; for sushki thinner than a quarter of an inch. The strips become little circles which are dropped into boiling sugary water and then baked in an oven. Traditionally, sushki were sold stringed on a twine, from which you’d bite them off if you were a kid or just crush them with your palm and munch on its crunchy wreckage fragrant with vanilla and sometimes honey.

They are also almost an ideal junk food. They work perfectly with tea. They work with milk. They work as a nighttime snack, a midday mood booster, and even as a quick morning bite when it’s too early to even think of breakfast. It’s five o’clock and you're craving carbs? Sushki are literally the golden cure for you only need a few yellow-brown rings to chase away your afternoon blues. And they are a calorie-friendly comfort food – low in food and high in comfort.

But most amazingly, this lovely combo of snack and dessert also used to serve as travel provisions. Sushki don’t spoil. I don’t think I've ever seen them go bad. Such impressive toughness made them easy to store and transport. Traveling across Russia years ago, merchants brought bundles of sushki on their journeys. Even if everything else turned sour and moldy, sushki wouldn’t!

Keep them in a dry place and they will stay crispy for weeks
without ever growing the blue dots of mold!

Off the Beaten Track: A Year in Mali

Our guest this week is Edith Maxwell, the author of SPEAKING OF MURDER (Barking Rain Press, under the pseudonym, Tace Baker) featuring Quaker linguistics professor Lauren Rousseau. Edith holds a PhD in linguistics and is a member of Amesbury Monthly Meeting of Friends. She also writes the Local Foods Mysteries. A TINE TO LIVE, A TINE TO DIE introduces organic farmer Cam Flaherty and a colorful Locavore Club (Kensington Publishing, June, 2013). A mother and technical writer, Edith lives north of Boston with her beau and three cats. Find her at http://www.facebook.com/EdithMaxwellAuthor, @edithmaxwell, and www.edithmaxwell.com. Tace Baker can be found at www.tacebaker.com, @tacebaker, and http://www.facebook.com/TaceBaker.

Mali. Home of the legendary Timbuktu, tall and gracious people, searing heat, the Niger River.

Bamako. A city of red dirt, crumbling colonial buildings next to Chinese-built skyscrapers, a winding and mysterious Grand Marche, open sewers, batiked damask cloth in gorgeous colors.

Edith and her boys

I spent a year in Mali twenty years ago with my (now-ex) husband and two small sons during my husband’s sabbatical from Boston University. We found a Belgian preschool for John David, age 2 ½ when we got there, and a French kindergarten for Allan, age 5. By the end of the year they were both fluent in French. We all picked up some Bambara, too, the first language of many Malians.

What did I do there? It was at a time in my life when I was home with my children and studying to be an independent childbirth educator. I worked on my course, taught a class to two American couples, and helped my children through culture shock. We, as most ex-pats do, hired someone to cook and clean for us. Doumbia, a wonderful local man, coaxed amazing meals out of the ancient Russian stove and washed our clothes by hand. He kept the red dust off the floors and entertained John David after his carpool dropped him off. If I had a year off at home in the United States, I’d be cleaning out closets, maybe picking up the cello again, organizing my life. But in Bamako I didn’t have those options and hadn’t yet realized I was a fiction writer.

I felt self-conscious walking our neighborhood streets. It helped immensely when I began exchanging greetings in Bambara with people who were staring at me. Ritual greetings are very important. You never just walk by and say the equivalent of, “How ya doin’?” I’ll let the book show you. My protagonist in Speaking of Murder, Professor Lauren, who served in the Peace Corps in Mali, has just ordered a meal at a Malian restaurant she discovered:

A plate laden with steaming chicken, onions, and rice arrived in front of me. I inhaled the scent of lemon and oil and thanked the proprietress. “Iniché!”

“Ntse! I ka kene wa?” The woman laughed heartily, grabbed my hand, introduced herself as Fatoumata Kone, and started the round of ritual Bambara greetings. They bounced back and forth between us until we had inquired about how the other had passed the night, how the other’s parents were, and so on, ending with a salutation of “Herebe.” Peace among us. Followed by “Here doron.” Peace only.

We all got sick a lot. In my first month there I was quite ill with an amoeba and then from the medicine. The boys came down with the local strain of chicken pox and had silver-dollar sized blisters on their backs. In January, the month John David turned three, he contracted both giardia and malaria despite the fact that we boiled and filtered our water at home. Luckily he was a sturdy boy and recovered well from both.

When the dry season hit in what in New England we call wintertime, the temperatures soared well over 100 every day. I learned to wear loose cotton clothing—the local garb of wide caftans is perfect for that climate—and walk slowly. The Harmattan winds came down off the Sahara. They blew fine red dust into all our closets and sucked the moisture out of our skin.

I was grateful to be able to travel out of town alone in the spring for a few days to visit a group of traditional midwives a full day’s journey from Bamako and hear their stories of childbirth. One of the midwives even urged me to adopt her tiny granddaughter. The baby’s mother, the midwife's daughter, had died in childbirth. I seriously considered the offer until I asked about the adoption process at the U.S. Embassy on my return to Bamako and decided, despite longing for a daughter, that it was way too complicated for our family.

The Grand Marche

The year enriched all of us. My children experienced something completely different from the rather small (and 98-percent white) Massachusetts town they were growing up in, and they had their brains stretched from learning a second and third language by immersion. I grew to love the gentle, generous, striking people we met, the flavors of hot peppers and spicy vegetable stews, moderated by the cool of a homemade ginger drink, the traditional music with djembe and kora. My husband renewed his friendship with people he had known a decade earlier when he wrote a Bambara-English dictionary. And you know what? It’s all background material now that I’m a writer.

Thanks for having me over, fellow travelers! I’d love to hear about others’ experiences in Africa, or answer questions about my stay there. Where in Africa have you always longed to go?

Edith...

...is off this week. Check back in two weeks for more of her travel tales from around the world.