You drink your tea, LiR, but my tangential wanderings - well wheelchair drivings [is that a word in English?] actually, has left me thirsty - not for sherry, alas, but for a nice port.
Can anyone explain why - following the Hispanic background of said drivings on the 'identity ...' thread?

It could be Nielsen that sherry has undergone a makeover in recent years and is no longer associated with a dusty old bottle of Bristol Cream to be found in a maiden aunt's side cabinet. These days the hipsters are drinking it chilled. Served with tapas - how Spanish and stylish. Even Harvey's cellar in Bristol's Denmark Street, for instance, is now a very trendy bar.

Port, on the other hand, is still reassuringly fuddy-duddy. Preferably drunk at Christmastime with a chunk of Stilton - or Roquefort or Gorgonzola or Danablu. Port is not the only Portuguese fortified wine however. There is, of course, Madeira using the Malvasia grape. Some believe that the old word 'Malmsey' stems from Malvasia but others suggest that it could come from Marsala in Sicily. And further east again in the Mediterranean there's Greece's Mavrodaphne. (What's with the letter 'M' and fortified wine?)

Talking about Marsala and image makeovers etc, in the 1970s and 1980s, and popular at student parties across Europe (including England), was Baby Bomba. Pronounced 'babbi bomba' it dispensed the blended wine in baby's bottles:



As well as Marsala you could also get them filled with grappa if I remember correctly. Probably illegal now and I'd imagine that the producers of Marsala (and grappa) would today shudder at the memory.

Vizzer wrote:

Port, on the other hand, is still reassuringly fuddy-duddy.

In France and Belgium port is currently very fashionable (and indeed has been for at least two decades now) as an apéritif, served chilled and over ice cubes, often in very generous quantities in large wine glasses.

Another couple of Ms to add to your list of fortified wines are Maury and Muscat de Rivesaltes, both strong (typically above 15% alcohol content) sweet wines from Roussillon, here in southern France. Maury is a red wine, very much like port itself, but made mostly from grenache grapes grown around the village of Maury in the upper valley of the Agly river; while Muscat de Rivesaltes is white or 'ambre' and uses small muscat grapes grown on the Roussillon plain around Perpignan (the small town of Rivesaltes is now the location of Perpignan airport).

For those with an interest in history - all of us I assume - the village of Maury is overlooked by Queribus castle, spectacularly perched on its rocky peak - the ridge originally marked the frontier between Aragon and France. The the fortress of Queribus was actually the very last Cathar stronghold to capitulate (in 1255) to Papal forces during the Albigensian Crusade. From a purely defensive point of view you can see why it was able to hold out so long but amazingly, given its high location, there is actually a small well within the castle walls, plus the roof of the central keep was designed to channel all rainwater down to the castle's water cisterns. It was nearly impregnable. However whilst the siege of the similarly impregnable hilltop fortress of Montségur finally ended in the terrible massacre of all the Cathars trapped within the walls (1244), at Queribus the Cathar defenders finally slipped away into Aragon or to Piedmont, and so the French army never had to try and take the impregnable castle by direct assault.

     

In contrast, at the lower end of the valley is Tautavel, where, in the Grotte d' Arago, which is located in a small side gorge, were found the 500,000 year-old remains of Tautavel man. (Tautavel wine is not fortified but is nevertheless a very good red wine in the Corbières style).

     

The television's been such utter rubbish recently, that I've been watching the Youtube channel. One of the things that Youtube does is give recommended videos to watch and some of these duly appeared including:



Which came as a surprise since I had not been looking at any computer games or anything similar. Turns out that Two Steps to Hell are actually a music production company, founded by Thomas Bergersen and Nick Phoenix, specialising in composing trailer and incidental music for films.

Any way I found it sufficiently impressive to buy one of their albums. Going by the comments on the Amazon page, Youtube is a common method of discovering this music:

An impressive sound Trike. I always think that composers of incidental music are often hugely underrated. To mind mind being able to compose music (of any sort) is the greatest of all artistic gifts. Think of, say, any of the one-hit-wonders from pop music - I'm always staggered at just how they start even putting it together, let alone where it all comes from. Yet some artists don't just produce one hit but indeed several and some many.

If you like Two Steps to Hell then you'll probably like In the Nursery (why do these groups always have such weird names?). In the Nursery or ITN also compose music for television programs. As a taster I'd recommend their thundering track Blue Religion from their 1991 album Sense. Ten years later they tweaked it and re-released it as New Religion on their album Engel (2001) which to my mind is even better then the original.

The Game of Thrones TV series had a soundtrack I enjoyed.  I don't want to post anything which might include spoilers - in case anyone wants to read the books/watch the show (though the adaptation became looser as the series progressed and the end was based on notes the author had told the showrunners as the book series is as yet unfinished).  Here is the King's party entering Winterfell (the home of the warden of the North) though there is some dialogue and the musical score is a little faint.



  

Here is the music alone fl - the sound is better quality than in the preceding sample.  

Vizzer wrote:

If you like Two Steps to Hell then you'll probably like In the Nursery (why do these groups always have such weird names?). In the Nursery or ITN also compose music for television programs. As a taster I'd recommend their thundering track Blue Religion from their 1991 album Sense. Ten years later they tweaked it and re-released it as New Religion on their album Engel (2001) which to my mind is even better then the original.

Thanks Vizzer, never heard of In the Nursery before.

Video of the track in question;

LadyinRetirement wrote:

The Game of Thrones TV series had a soundtrack I enjoyed.  

So do I, LiR. There is a soundtrack cd for each series, which would come to an eight album collection.

I'll just listen to them on youtube at the moment and maybe in the future start collecting them.

It's sobering to think it's 20 years since the attack on the World Trade Centre.

But with my mug of tea near at hand, I wonder if anyone can give me any pointers about checking up on something.  I'd done some looking on the internet for information about tidal bores.  I'm also looking for something to offer for the next conversational French Zoom meeting.  I came across an account that Léopoldine, one of Victor Hugo's daughters, died at the age of 19 (she was newly married too) in a boating accident because of the tidal bore ('mascaret') on the Seine.  My understanding is that the tidal bore doesn't show these days - or if it does it is smaller than formerly - because of work done on the river.  However another article mentioned the accident that took Léopoldine's life but didn't mention the tidal bore.  A sad event in any case.

Then I might do what the group leader sometimes does when looking for stories/news in French and type 'faits divers' into a search engine and see what emerges.

The tidal bore on the river Seine is probably as well known in France as the Severn bore is in England but as you say dredging of the river in the 1960s has now largely eliminated it. Nevertheless as the second of these two youtubes describes, there is still sometimes a surge of water upstream with the current reversing direction, which ships moored in the lower River Seine should be prepared for (I also liked the story of how during the Occupation, le Mascaret worked for the Résistance). There are also still pronounced and sometimes even surfable bores (mascarets) on the rivers Garonne and Dordogne (which both enter the same constricted estuary at Bordeaux).





Regarding Léopoldine's death: she had married Charles Vacquerie only six months earlier and was just 19 years old and pregnant when she died (on 4 September 1843). Their boat, as you say, was caught in le Mascaret while they were innocently boating on the river at Villequier-sur-Seine. They were overwhelmed by the waves and her wet, heavy skirts pulled her down, along with her husband who was desperately trying to save her. Her father, Victor Hugo, dedicated numerous poems to the memory of his daughter, notably 'Demain dès l'aube' (Tomorrow at Dawn) in which he described a visit to his daughter's grave four years after her death. It's not the most cheerful of things for your French class, LiR, but perhaps a good translation/comprehension exercise (particularly of the simple future tense).

Demain, dès l'aube, à l'heure où blanchit la campagne,
Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m'attends.
J'irai par la forêt, j'irai par la montagne.
Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.

Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées,
Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit,
Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées,
Triste, et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit.

Je ne regarderai ni l'or du soir qui tombe,
Ni les voiles au loin descendant vers Harfleur,
Et, quand j'arriverai, je mettrai sur ta tombe
Un bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur.
............

Tomorrow, at dawn, at the moment when the land whitens,
I will leave. You see, I know that you are waiting for me.
I will go through the forest, I will go across mountains.
I cannot stay away from you any longer.

I will walk eyes fixed on my thoughts,
Without seeing anything outside, without hearing a noise,
Alone, unknown, back hunched, hands crossed,
Sorrowed, and the day for me will be as the night.

I will watch neither the evening gold fall,
Nor the faraway sails descending upon Harfleur.
And when I arrive, I will put on your grave
A bouquet of green holly and heather in bloom.

I’d never heard of le Mascaret either.

Regarding conversational French, I’m trying to work out what the fellow in the second film posted by MM is saying. At 1:56, and again at 2:18, he uses a term which sounds like ‘côte becquée’ while relating the story of how the German officer had to be fished out of the water after having ignored warnings about the danger posed by le Mascaret. I don’t know if ‘côte becquée’ is what he is saying or something else, but I’m guessing that it refers to the local people. Neither film (as far as I can tell) gives the name of the exact location where the bore is filmed. The 1958 British Movietone News reel, however, mentions ‘the estuary of the Seine … towards Paris’ which doesn’t narrow it down much (excuse the pun).

Also interesting to note is the use of incidental music in both films. There’s the familiar, formulaic and almost identikit dramatic, orchestral piece from the stable of Meyer de Wolfe in the 1958 clip (which could equally have been used in almost any Movietone, Pathé or Gaumont newsreel from that era). And then there’s the slightly more varied styles of music used in the more recent France 3 film.
  
You mentioned the dialogue in the Game of Thrones clip LiR, and that it’s possible to hear the music better on the second recording (without dialogue). Yet the art of incidental music is surely in matching it to words and images. I note, for instance, that in the comments section on the YouTube page linked to by Trike for In the Nursery’s New Religion, it’s mentioned that the piece was used in the BBC’s 2014 documentary about the 1955 Le Mans disaster. That would seem to me to be precisely how such music is intended to be received – i.e. with narration and pictures.

Although this is described as an "eygre" this seems to have been a storm surge.
https://www.bartleby.com/246/604.html

The Trent does host an eagre (aka aegir), second only to Sabrina's in UK terms.

Vizzer wrote:

Regarding conversational French, I’m trying to work out what the fellow in the second film posted by MM is saying. At 1:56, and again at 2:18 ...

The word he uses is Caudebecais, that is an inhabitant of Caudebec (Caudebec-en-Caux) which is a town on the Seine. Hence, as you rightly supposed, he just means "a local", who would well know the dangers of the Mascaret but was perhaps unlikely to inform any occupying German soldiers: "aucune Caudebecais qui leur disait, surtout vous approchez pas" ("no Caudebecais told them, above all you don't go near"), although his second mention of the term is when he says it was actually a Caudebec local who eventually rescued the German officer. Caudebec-en-Caux is located about 80 kms upstream of Le Havre, on the north/right bank of the Seine and on the outside of a large looping meander which seems to have made the Mascaret particularly spectacular at that point. I'm guessing that is where most of that old film footage was recorded. The adjacent town just 4 kms downstream from Caudebec on the same right-hand bank, is Villequier (both towns are now merged into the same commune of Rives-en-Seine) and that is where Victor Hugo's daughter and her husband were drowned by the Mascaret in 1843 (his family lived in the town and the Hugo family often stayed there).

This is the tomb of Léopoldine and Charles Vacquerie in the cemetery of the church of Saint-Martin at Villequier-sur-Seine. Note the flowering heather, "le bruyère en fleur", mentioned in Victor Hugo's poem 'Demain dès l'aube'.

It's nice that the heather is still blooming on the grave - no accident I'm sure.

I read something online where someone has been monitoring Trent aegirs.  Apparently there has been a disappointing show if any over the last two years.  Here is a clip of a noticeable one from February 2019.

Vizzer, the music with dialogue from GoT is probably better in the original programme than in the extract I had found online.  I chose something from near the beginning of the series because I didn't want to spoil anything in case someone unfamiliar with the story chanced on this page and decided to read it in the future.  There is solid (in my view at least) music throughout that series.  I liked some of the incidental music in season 8 (the season which displeased a lot of viewers) but to have included it might have spoiled things.  When the showrunners signed up to adapt the series they anticipated that George R R Martin would have finished the complete series but as is well known he hasn't completed it yet so they had to 'wing it' a bit for the last three seasons (GRRM had given them some brief pointers as to how the story would finish) so I have some sympathy for them.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

It's nice that the heather is still blooming on the grave - no accident I'm sure.

Not when just a few hundred metres away from the cemetery there's the Musée Victor Hugo located in the Maison Victor Hugo on the Quai Victor Hugo. Villequier-sur-Seine certainly seems proud of its adopted literary son and his family, and for his potential as a tourist attraction. Although actually entrance to the Victor Hugo Museum is just 4€; 2€ for students and OAPs; or free for children under 18, the disabled and those on benefits  ... so it really isn't expensive at all.

Thankyou for that clarification Meles. So he says that no local Caudebecais warned the Germans of the danger, rather than (as I had misheard it) the Germans had been warned, had ignored the warnings and then had had to be rescued by the warning givers - thus making them appear doubly foolish. For the Caudebecais to have not warned the Germans of the danger but then to have rescued them once they got into difficulty makes it a very human story. We're sometimes like that, we might theoretically wish someone ill - but not really.

New film from Kenneth Branagh:

Trike, regarding the clip for the Kenneth Branagh film, isn't that Mance from GoT (Ciaran Hinds) at 0.44 approximately?

The very same, LiR:

Ciaran Hinds was Julius Caesar in 'Rome' also - well he's been in loads of things over the years. He can play characters with presence though in the 'Belfast' trailer it looked as though he was playing a grandad.

Thinking of the Trent aegir, apparently the Yorkshire Ouse also has an aegir although it perhaps shows less than the Trent (on a good day) one.  They are both rivers which flow out to see through the Humber estuary; I wonder if the name 'aegir' has persisted because the Yorkshire Ouse and the tidal part of the Trent were in what was once called the Danelaw.

I've always had a soft spot for the Danelaw, LiR, and have often wondered if England might have been a better place had Canute's dynasty persisted. The Raven Banner probably didn't help their cause much though. Scary and menacing. A bit like the Prussian army's death's head motif in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries perhaps. One can imagine a warrior in Guthrum's or Canute's army before a battle, looking across at the colourful red and yellow wyvern banners and streamers of the Saxons and then turning to look up at their own black raven banner and (with a nod to Mitchell and Webb) asking - "Are we the baddies?".

She's at church; presumably to receive benedicktion:

He's behind you......................Oh yes he is:

Where's Nordmann: does anyone know?

The last time he posted was on 7 July in response to PaulRyckier's death. Six weeks after that on 18 August I messaged him a friendly note saying I hoped he was alright although I assumed his absence was due to work or holidays. The message was opened but I got no response although I wasn't necessarily expecting one. PaulR was a regular poster as well as frequently communicating by PM (in which he'd shared personal details) and so his absence was quickly noticed and a bit of sleuthing between us rapidly found out what had unfortunately happened. Nordmann, particularly of late, has been been a more infrequent poster, nevertheless we're now about 15 weeks after his last message. When do we start to worry?

I hope he's not gone like Ferval, who suddenly disappeared without trace. Or maybe he's testing us, like the French gourmand, Grimod de La Reynière, who, having openly criticised the Revolutionary authorities and upset Napoléon, decided he had better keep his head down for a bit. He had his death publicly announced with a note saying that all who had known him were invited to the funeral dinner - which he too attended just to see who would turn up and if they'd missed him.

So, has anyone heard from Nordmann recently?

Maybe just having a break.

 I did for a while.

Yes - you went walkabout for the best part of 2019 Trike if I remember correctly. Nordmann, however, has never been absent for longer than about a month. In the late summer of 2017 his absence prompted an earlier thread:

Nordmann

But as Meles points out, for nordmann (as site administrator) to be away for 15 weeks is definitely concerning. I'm also puzzled by the latest post from Green George on the Daily Bread thread. That looks to me like the posting of a bot rather than by Green George himself. I know that Green George's earlier login as Gilgamesh was locked and I hope that this hasn't happened again. George, if you're reading, do let us know. But it could be that he's unable to log in precisely because his account has been hijacked. I know of at least one other messageboard which was abandoned by its administrator only to then be devoured by robots. I really do hope, however, that these concerns are unfounded.

Vizzer wrote:

Yes - you went walkabout for the best part of 2019 Trike if I remember correctly. Nordmann, however, has never been absent for longer than about a month. In the late summer of 2017 his absence prompted an earlier thread:

Nordmann

But as Meles points out, for nordmann (as site administrator) to be away for 15 weeks is definitely concerning. 

 
Indeed Vizzer, retired from work and (temporarily) retired from posting.

Nordmann's absence is somewhat disconcerting.


Has anyone else come across this? The 90-9-1 ratio for internet forums.

Basically, 90% of forum visitors will only look at the posts and take no part in the activity of the board. 9% will join but will post very little or not at all, while the remaining 1% will be regular contributors.

I don't post very often here, mostly because the history topics are beyond my knowledge. When I was at school we did what I know realise was Britain's drive towards constitutional history, going through the monarchs till we reached George III (I think). And at my two-year course in History at university we concentrated on the Goths and Visigoths and Huns, as I recall. I was offered to do honours in History but chose English instead. 
My father did fight in WWII but he was no soldier ("I would take to the hills rather than go to war again") and until I wrote up his letters and my husband got interested I didn't have much knowledge of the various battles. Still don't really know what WWI was all about. Have some knowledge of colonial history because it is what is talked about here in Aotearoa/New Zealand. I dislike the present attitude of trying to write people out of history (Captain Cook is the name of a famous student pub in Dunedin and people are now talking about changing its name - it feels to me like they are trying to take away a bit of my history and I resent that).

I think Nordmann has been away for more than a month but probably not as long as this time.

Of course nordmann's input into the discussions of this board is greatly missed - even if he and I have great fights most of the time. Someone is running the board otherwise it would be chaos - possibly he is doing that or has a minion to do it but he is more likely greatly taken by another project to do with his life's work in a vital field. Hopefully when his current project gets into full swing he will have the time - and I hope interest enough to interact here again. I may have got this wrong but the guy I found on line with his name is very busy doing the very thing that our guy is professionally into.... and of course I did not quite understand all of the pitch, either, so I really must have found the right man. Here's wishing you well, nord, anyway. When I am next wheeled out into the sun I shall order a pint of porter -so cheers. Regards. P,

I might join you in a porter P. I haven't had one for years. It's funny how these previously quintessentially English beverages are now often associated with anywhere but England. For example, about 10 or so years ago there was a craze amongst youngsters about pear cider, a 'new' concept from Sweden apparently. Had their parents or grandparents never told them about perry?

But long may this mild weather last. Yesterday morning I even spotted a colourful butterfly in the garden. I didn't get a very good look at it because it fluttered by quickly but it looked like a Small Tortoiseshell or a Painted Lady or a Comma. Now, I know that technically the butterfly season lasts until the first frosts and that this can be as late as November, but normally we don't tend to see butterflies after the first fortnite in September. And even in high summer they're rare these days. So to see one in the second half of October was quite something.

We see gallons of white butterflies here in NZ/Aotearoa but don't welcome them since they tend to like cabbages and other brassica. Monarch butterflies are very welcome and people keep swan plants precisely to attract/feed them. I don't even know the names of Tortoiseshell or Comma butterflies. 

I am not quite sure what a porter is but my husband is very fond of dark beers, and buys a variety of brands of these. Though of course when I check what they are I can only find a Stoke Dark. The others are Pilsners or Pale Ales or Stella Artois.

Is porter anything like stout?  Both are off limits for me and gluten free beer is terribly expensive.

But I really popped here to mention that someone phoned "from the call blocking department" telling me that my calls were going to be blocked so I blocked him. I don't want anyone to think I'm being dismissive of their intelligence - I have known of people with good brains falling for confidence tricks. I can't find the dedicated thread for scams at present.

I'm just finishing a snack lunch and a cup of tea before joining an online U3A group.  I was going to say I'd spent some time doing some tidying up in the garden without getting the low backache that sometimes follows such work but it started up. I shouldn't have thought about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtgIlGMrCeo

Good explanation here https://www.beerhawk.co.uk/blog/post/porter-vs-stout about the differences between stout & porter.

A story for Halloween

And now having watched Trike's youtube, why not have some historic Halloween pumpkin cheesecake:



I really think I need to make this if Max's face when he finally tastes it is anything to go by (at 15:20).

Started my Halloween films last night with this one, a classic from 1933:




For those interested in military technology, the type of aircraft used to attack Kong on the Empire State Building was the Curtiss F8C ( also in the 2005 version)

Here in Aotearoa/New Zealand we are just recently beginning the craze of Halloween; people here associate it with the USA, but I date it to Scotland. Still doesn't make me like it any more though we usually have some bags of lollies ready for kids who don't usually come.
What I don't understand is why in Britain pumpkin is just thought of as stock feed or for Halloween whereas in NZ we treat it as a food - it makes the most delicious soup and is good roasted or boiled. I also don't understand why my British parents-in-law used it in the NZ way. Maybe my father-in-law who travelled a lot in his early days here picked it up.

Caro wrote:

Still doesn't make me like it any more though we usually have some bags of lollies ready for kids who don't usually come.

I had to read that sentence twice to fully appreciate the humour Caro. Brilliant!

I agree that in the UK the pumpkin is generally grown and bought merely to be carved into jack-o-lanterns but rarely to cook and eat. But if Meles' pumpkin cheesecake catches on than that could all change. A warming autumn soup, however, would be more to my taste.

Most pumpkins grown just for size are fairly tasteless, while the tastiest ones tend not to be the classic round, orange, jack-o-lantern type (the flavour also gets sweeter and more intense with storage), so I wonder if that might have put some people off eating them if they only ever saw them in the shops around the end of October. But surely these days the supermarkets should be able to source all sorts of tasty varieties: French shops have numerous varieties of poitiron, courge, gourde, squash and citrouille on sale at the moment. Pumpkins are not difficult to grow and they are decorative in addition to providing a fresh vegetable over lean winter months as they store well.

Here's the majority of my crop of several different varieties: orange chestnut-tasting 'Potimarrons'; pleated dark green/brown 'Musquée de Provence'; yellow marrow-shaped 'Longue de Nice'; and I suspect also a couple of hybrids arising from the seeds that I collected from last year's crop. The weather has been so mild of late that I've got another three still ripening in the garden plus I've already eaten a couple that got damaged and looked like they would soon go mouldy.



In England pumpkin seems to be firmly associated only with Halloween (and maybe Thanksgiving) although neither of which were celebrated much, if at all, when I was a child (1960s). Dorothy Hartley in 'Food in England', first published in 1954, dismisses pumpkin as "Never very popular in England, I can find no good English dishes, so add two American ones, from a book of 1870 ... " although despite what she says pumpkyn or pumpion or pompion recipes occur in English cookbooks dating back to the mid 16th century when the plant first arrived in England and started to be grown.

Vizzer said..But if Meles' pumpkin cheesecake catches on than that could all change. A warming autumn soup, however, would be more to my taste.

I don't recall ever having seen these in the shops, but they do exist:

Today's viewing;



cue for a song;

With COP26 underway in Glasgow, Frankie the Dinosaur addresses the UN:

I don't understand why anyone would buy pottled pumpkin soup when it is so easy to make: just cook up sliced pumpkin, drain some of the water off and mash it as much as you can, add a little milk, salt and pepper. And that's it really. I suppose you could add other flavourings but basically it doesn't need them.

Mrs V makes a wonderful pumpkin soup which pretty much follows your recipe Caro although she sometimes adds toasted, flaked almonds and fresh thyme. Another autumn/winter warmer soup she does is roasted red pepper soup which basically involves red peppers, red onion, a few cherry tomatoes and a couple of cloves of garlic all roasted together in a roasting tin with a little olive oil until blackening skins. Then all are added to a vegetable or chicken stock and whizzed together in a blender or using a blending stick. And that’s it. Just superb! Indeed, we had soup yesterday for lunch.

Back to pumpkins. We’ve had a selection of them in the larder of late (don’t ask me the names of the varieties) but they include a large, bright orange one which I carved into a lantern, a small yellow one which Mrs V uses for soup and a couple of middle-sized dark orange (almost red) ones. I took one of these yesterday and decided to make the pumpkin cheesecake from the Tasting History video linked to by Meles upthread.
 
Peeling the pumpkin was surprisingly hard work at first, the red skin is tuff - but I soon got at feel for it and speeded up. After boiling the diced flesh and then blending it, the straining of it took a lot longer than I expected. At one point I was tempted to try squeezing the mush thru a muslin cloth but I patiently stuck with the sieve method as used in the video. When the liquid was drained away, the dryish pumpkin pulp was double the quantity required so I transferred half of it into a storage container to go in the freezer for use in a soup or even a later cheesecake. Adding the ricotta, the mascarapone and the beaten eggs was strait-forward. It’s interesting to note that in Terence Scully’s translation of Bartolomeo Scappi’s recipe, the 16th century cook would have used a mortar and then a colander to grind and push the ingredients together. Thankfully we have electric blenders and whisks these days. Scappi’s recipe also called for 10 eggs, Max Miller suggested 7 eggs while I used 6. (I only had a carton of 6 eggs in the kitchen and didn’t fancy a trip to the grocers for the sake of 1 egg.)
 
Around this time I tasted a sneaky teaspoon of mascarpone mixed with some of the cooked pumpkin puree and that was a sublime taste combination just in itself so I was encouraged in the project. I, therefore, happily added the brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger, double cream and unsalted butter and there was no turning back. In the video Max questions the amount of butter needed to grease the baking pan and he’s quite right to. I used about half of what he did. While Max used what looked like a ceramic dish to bake the cake in, I used a heavy-bottomed sauté pan which is a bit like an iron skillet but with steel handles. This wasn’t so much to be in keeping with Scappi’s use of a ‘tourte pan’ but it was easier to just melt the nob of butter in the pan on a low heat, swirl it around to cover the surfaces and then add the mixture. The whole thing could then be popped into the pre-heated oven.
 


(A heavy-bottomed sauté pan)
 
Once baked, the cooling of the cake is the part where patience is critical. After bedighting (I love that word) the top of the cake with a sprinkling of sugar and cinnamon, Max suggests turning the oven off and leaving it in there with the oven door closed for 45 minutes. This is good advice. It needs to cool down very gradually to firm. It’s probably a bit like a meringue whereby if it cools too quickly it could run to a liquid goo. After the 45 minutes are up, the video suggests removing the cake from the oven and letting it cool for ‘a bit more’. For me this ‘bit more’ was actually well over an hour. But I’m quite a patient chap. I also put the lid on the pan after taking it out the oven for fear that the cake might dry out too much. Using this method you could leave it to cool for even 2 hours and it would still be warm.
 
The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. In the video Max describes its texture as being like a pudding. And its consistency is indeed identical to, say, a bread and butter pudding. It’s very moist. It’s not really a cake at all but is probably better described as being a pudding or a flan or indeed a torte. The taste is divine. I can’t say that I got much flavour of pumpkin as such but if you’ve got cream, cheese, eggs, butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and ginger in something then you know that it’s going to be good. Scappi says serve it hot but it can be eaten cold too. It was exquisite last nite served warm but it was equally good cold this morning as a delightful breakfast. Mrs V gives it 8 out of 10 which from her is praise indeed. I might try it again sometime perhaps swapping out the cinnamon and ginger for, say, nutmeg and cardamom or some such and see how that works. But Scappi’s cheesecake recipe is just brilliant. Thanks for the link Meles!

Especially after your recommendation, Viz, I'm now definitely going to be making some of Scappi's pumpkin cheesecake. I also think I need to get hold of Terence Scully's English translation of the 'Opera di Bartolomeo Scappi' - it sounds just up my street - although looking on-line it certainly ain't cheap.

I wonder, since Scappi specifed "very hot" butter in the bottom of the pan, whether he intended it to work a bit like Yorkshire pudding, where the outer layer of the batter basically fries when you pour it into the very hot fat. Doing it like that would also give it a more distinct outer layer somewhat like a very thin crust. That would also account for the quantity of butter specified which is much more than just for greasing the pan.

I'm also reminded of the practicalities of using a 16th century wood-fired oven. The oven would be intensely hot at first once the ashes had been raked out, and was then immediately available for baking bread (its usual function) or alternatively for a brief 'very hot' initial baking in a buttered pan for a fancy tourte. So my guess for what was originally intended is that the buttered dish went straight into a very hot oven once the ashes had been raked out, then, after it had been in there for a few minutes the batter was poured in and briefly fried. After that the oven was properly re-sealed (with clay or rough dough as was the usual practice) and left untouched while the oven gradually cooled and the dish inside slowly cooked. With no thermostat nor any means to just 'turn up the temperature a bit for a few minutes more', experience of one's oven and timing would be absolutely critical.

In many ways Scappi's tourte is similar to a Basque cheesecake which, although not the prettiest cheesecake in the world, is extremely easy compared to most other baked cheesecakes. No crust, no need to worry about getting the baking exactly right and no fussing over tiny air bubbles that might cause it to crack. Tastes good too.

Here's a very quick visual summary of making Basque 'burnt' cheesecake:



This week's offering from Max is about Yorkshire parkin for Bonfire Night and although he's from Burbank, California, I nevertheless think, recipe-wise, he gets it just about spot on - although perhaps that's not all that surprising when for his recipe he's using May Byron's highly-regarded cookbook, 'Pot Luck, or the British Home Cookery Book' (publ. 1915).

Apparently today is National Sandwich Day.

Orkney Library came up with this;

I suspect that you're on the money Meles with the Yorkshire pudding analogy. That would indeed create an all-over crust and, on reflection, was almost certainly Scappi's intention. It will be interesting to see what the result is if you try that. With regard to the parkin episode, then I'm amazed at how the Guy Fawkes mask has become a globally recognised icon over recent years. I'm pretty sure that when I worked in Belfast, for instance, Guy Fawkes night wasn't even marked there and that's inside the UK. Yet now people are donning Guy Fawkes masks in places as far afield as California and Thailand etc.

I like the book sandwich Trike. I think that I'd remove Annabel Pitcher's Ketchup Clouds and Farrington by Francis Bacon and also Eggs, delicious recipes for all occasions by Alex Barker and replace them with this musical autobiography:



Being a Lincolnshire-born lad, I'm sure that Joe Brown would also appreciate a quality sausage sandwich.

We just had pumpkin soup today using the pumpkin that my son had cut out for Halloween, just an ordinary orange pumpkin. My husband chopped it into bits about 2" by 2", I cooked it, peeled it, then cooked an onion in the juice (should have added it earlier). He added some tinned garlic (all our homegrown garlic has rotted - too long picked, I suppose), , butter, salt and pepper, mashed it, and I added milk to mine after it was served. Very simple and quite lovely and enough for lunch tomorrow.
We have a saute pan a bit like yours but instead of the handle it just has a second whatever the other end is called. My husband uses it a great deal, but it is too heavy for me to lift easily now.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

melodious birdsong

Not as melodious as the song birds of spring are the calls of migrating birds in autumn. The 2 main culprits for us would be starlings and brent geese. Both species are actually arriving in the British Isles from further north in order to over-winter here, rather than heading south as our popular conception of what migration is might have us believe. I've never been able to work out how they manage to fly directly over our house at precisely the crack of dawn each year. It must be a co-incidence surely. As if to make up for their rudeness, however, the starlings do put on a spectacular murmuration about a couple of miles away in the evenings which we're sometimes privileged to watch if out for a walk at that time. I don't know what the geese' excuse is though.