Aha! Remember that (not exactly) recipe for Snowe I posted a couple days ago? Well, the Medieval Cookery website actually relates a much more detailed recipe:
Source [Gloning, 16th cent. A Proper Neue Book of Cokery]: To make dyschefull of Snowe: Take a pottel of swete thycke creame and the whytes of eyghte egges, and beate them altogether wyth a spone, then putte them in youre creame and a saucerful of Rosewater, and a dyshe full of Suger wyth all, then take a stick and make it cleane, and than cutte it in the ende foure squsre, and therwith beate all the aforesayde thynges together, and as ever it ryseth takeit of and put it into a Collaunder, this done take one apple and set it in the myddes of it, and a thick bushe of Rosemary, and set it in the myddes of the platter, then cast your Snowe uppon the Rosemary and fyll your platter therwith. And yf you have wafers cast some in wyth all and thus serve them forthe.
Well, that clarifies everything! Heh. Actually, this page includes a modern version, with measurements, instructions, and all.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Gen Con Highlights, Day Three
1. We played in a scheduled session of the game, Hot War, with Malcolm Craig, the writer and designer. The game is another semi-historical one, set in post nuclear war London, after the Cold War of the fifties "went hot" and nuclear bombs were detonated in various areas. The mechanics of the game are really interesting. It revolves around relationships to determine conflict resolution--whether it be a heated discussion between characters, or an all out melee. Relationships and goals affect how many dice you're able to roll against who or whatever is opposing. Narration is not only done by the GM, but there are also opportunities for other players to either smooth the way or throw a wrench into the works by adding bits to the story. It's fairly simple once you get the concept down. Malcolm was incredibly fun as a GM. Wonderful Scottish accent aside, he was clearly excited about running the game, and it translated into all of us having a great time, with some surprising twists.
2. I got to meet and chat with Emily Care Boss, the designer of some really interesting relational storytelling games. Did some walking around the dealer hall, chatted with a bunch of nice folks.
2. The Brazilian Steakhouse in downtown Indianapolis. Words cannot describe. I was practically full after the amazing salad bar. Yes... I coupled the words "salad bar" with "amazing." On purpose. Not to mention the meat, meat, and more meat, they brought from table to table. There's a little card by your plate, and green means, "descend upon me with various wonderful meats!" while red means, "Oh God... Please let me digest. *whimper*" It really was as much entertainment as it was a meal. Next year we will fast the day before we go.
2. I got to meet and chat with Emily Care Boss, the designer of some really interesting relational storytelling games. Did some walking around the dealer hall, chatted with a bunch of nice folks.
2. The Brazilian Steakhouse in downtown Indianapolis. Words cannot describe. I was practically full after the amazing salad bar. Yes... I coupled the words "salad bar" with "amazing." On purpose. Not to mention the meat, meat, and more meat, they brought from table to table. There's a little card by your plate, and green means, "descend upon me with various wonderful meats!" while red means, "Oh God... Please let me digest. *whimper*" It really was as much entertainment as it was a meal. Next year we will fast the day before we go.
Gen Con Highlights, Day Two
1. Played through a Godlike module headed up by Shane Ivey, who is the publisher of the book, and the co-writer of that particular adventure. Godlike is a game set toward the end of World War II, and is essentially a history narrative game, with the added interest of both The Nazis and the Allies having "talents," or super powered people at their disposal. This creates a whole slew of interesting conflict resolution options.
For example, in the campaign we've just begun with Alex, the character I came up with not only is proficient with hand to hand combat, but she has the ability to rust metal. All the metal in her vicinity slowly rusts, and if she concentrates, she's able to create an accelerated blast of effect in a wide diameter that causes metal to turn to dust in seconds. This is a very handy skill, however, some thought has to go into using it, since it will affect her own party as well, leaving them without weapons etc.
The scenario with Shane was load of fun, and the characters actually not only all survived, but we accomplished our objective.
2. Indie publishing and writing seminars. Excellent---we spent all morning listening to interesting people who've written interesting things. I believe some of the separate seminars will be podcast online. If so, I'll like it for those of you who are interested.
3. Indie Game Awards. It's really neat to become familiar with the faces of people who've written things I've been thrilled about. The awards were short, sweet, and informal. Reign won Best Game of the year, and The Blossoms are Falling took home several nods as well. The Blossoms... is a supplementary setting for Burning Wheel (one of the most beautifully packaged books, in my opinion). It's set in Heian era Japan (794-1189).
4. Lots of chatting with the Indie folks over at the Small Press area. Some really fantastic and very interesting people.
5. A tiny two year old storm trooper pushing his own stroller, while his mom walked along beside. He was alternately dragging and gnawing on his blaster. My head almost exploded from the cuteness. Pictures to come.
For example, in the campaign we've just begun with Alex, the character I came up with not only is proficient with hand to hand combat, but she has the ability to rust metal. All the metal in her vicinity slowly rusts, and if she concentrates, she's able to create an accelerated blast of effect in a wide diameter that causes metal to turn to dust in seconds. This is a very handy skill, however, some thought has to go into using it, since it will affect her own party as well, leaving them without weapons etc.
The scenario with Shane was load of fun, and the characters actually not only all survived, but we accomplished our objective.
2. Indie publishing and writing seminars. Excellent---we spent all morning listening to interesting people who've written interesting things. I believe some of the separate seminars will be podcast online. If so, I'll like it for those of you who are interested.
3. Indie Game Awards. It's really neat to become familiar with the faces of people who've written things I've been thrilled about. The awards were short, sweet, and informal. Reign won Best Game of the year, and The Blossoms are Falling took home several nods as well. The Blossoms... is a supplementary setting for Burning Wheel (one of the most beautifully packaged books, in my opinion). It's set in Heian era Japan (794-1189).
4. Lots of chatting with the Indie folks over at the Small Press area. Some really fantastic and very interesting people.
5. A tiny two year old storm trooper pushing his own stroller, while his mom walked along beside. He was alternately dragging and gnawing on his blaster. My head almost exploded from the cuteness. Pictures to come.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Gen Con the First: A Day One Rundown
This being our first experience with Gen Con, the world's biggest gaming convention, we thought we'd take it pretty easy the first day. We're staying in a lovely little B&B/inn just a few minutes from the convention center and several hotels participating in the convention. It's an arts and crafts era mansion that's been divided up into rooms, and ours has a charmingly high bed and ceilings, with tall windows overlooking the garden. It wasn't exactly what we'd planned on, but everything else was booked--with 27,000 geeks coming to town at once, that's hardly surprising. It was a happy accident, which we may consider doing again.
Gen Con Day One Highlights:
1. It is very weird to suddenly be surrounded by thousands of people with the same interests. As we walked from the parking garage, I had a growing odd feeling until I suddenly realized that we were surrounded entirely by nerds. Ahh. My people!
2. Is that Chewbacca I see? Why yes. It IS Chewbacca. Or at least, it was the very imposingly tall Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in the orginal Star Wars movies. Interestingly, his hair looks pretty much like Chewbacca's hairdo.
3. We met and chatted with Luke Crane, the creator of our current indie game favorite: Burning Wheel. This is something that's true throughout the con--several times today we walked up to a booth to find that the person selling the game is actually the person who designed and wrote it. Surprisingly, designers and writers are more than willing to spend time chatting with you about things--not just hawking their wares, but chatting about what types of games you're interested in, their current favorites, etc. Other interesting chats with game designers included Ron Edwards (the father of indie gaming) who actually ran a demo for 4 of us to show us Spione, his recent project. It's a WWII game set in Berlin that uses playing cards to advance the story. We also had a chance to chat with Robert Bohl, who designed the game Misspent Youth, which we picked up.
4. This kind of goes along with #3 in terms of the sheer amount of interesting people we talked to. We ran into some of the guys from a favorite podcast, and had a chance to hang out with a couple of the guys who did translation and publishing for some of the first Japanese RPGs ever released in English.
5. Rebecca Guay. She was there. I waved. I love her art.
6. Indianapolis. It's a really lovely city. Lots of neat parks and squares, very clean, interesting architechture. It's been a pleasure to bumble around in it.
7. Tomas the Lapidary. He was not only selling a whole lot of very beautiful metal and stone jewelry, but he had his grinder right there and was making pieces. We got talking and it was really interesting to learn a little bit about working with copper. Fun human interest story: He was working on a headpiece for a woman who'd requested something to wear for her wedding--it was beautiful, incidentally. She'd expected it to take a few months, so it was a bit of a shock when he told her to come back in a couple hours for it. He was brushing and buffing it when I saw it, and I happened to be there when the bride-to-be stopped back. He'd exceeded her expectations so much that she burst into tears. He patted her with his big leather-gloved hand. It was very sweet.
A+ Number One Highlight of Day One was the lecture on Medieval Food Preservation by Daniel Meyers. It was absolutely fascinating stuff--the man was a veritable encyclopedia of information, and the lecture ended up with a huge question and answer session that yielded all kinds of interesting tidbits. I jotted down several recipes and ideas he mentioned. As if going to the lecture wasn't good enough, we ran into him as we were wandering toward the car, and got talking some more about medieval cookery and recipes. The topic wandered all over Western Europe as we stood on a street corner, and eventually the three of us ended up wandering into a cushy hotel lobby and ordering drinks, and talking. It turns out he and his wife and family live fairly near us, and he's going to have us over and teach us some more hearty medieval recipes! He was a really great guy. I'm kind of ridiculously excited to have made such a neat friend who's such a well of knowledge.
A recipe to round the night out:
Snowe (no exact measurements, I'm afraid)
Whipping cream
egg whites
sugar
rose water--not the tiny perfume kind, the bigger bottles
Apparently if you add the egg whites to the cream, whip it, and add the sugar and rose water, it's just divine. As I was scribbling the recipe down, Ed started to ask if we were going to try making it. I nodded vigorously.
Gen Con Day One Highlights:
1. It is very weird to suddenly be surrounded by thousands of people with the same interests. As we walked from the parking garage, I had a growing odd feeling until I suddenly realized that we were surrounded entirely by nerds. Ahh. My people!
2. Is that Chewbacca I see? Why yes. It IS Chewbacca. Or at least, it was the very imposingly tall Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in the orginal Star Wars movies. Interestingly, his hair looks pretty much like Chewbacca's hairdo.
3. We met and chatted with Luke Crane, the creator of our current indie game favorite: Burning Wheel. This is something that's true throughout the con--several times today we walked up to a booth to find that the person selling the game is actually the person who designed and wrote it. Surprisingly, designers and writers are more than willing to spend time chatting with you about things--not just hawking their wares, but chatting about what types of games you're interested in, their current favorites, etc. Other interesting chats with game designers included Ron Edwards (the father of indie gaming) who actually ran a demo for 4 of us to show us Spione, his recent project. It's a WWII game set in Berlin that uses playing cards to advance the story. We also had a chance to chat with Robert Bohl, who designed the game Misspent Youth, which we picked up.
4. This kind of goes along with #3 in terms of the sheer amount of interesting people we talked to. We ran into some of the guys from a favorite podcast, and had a chance to hang out with a couple of the guys who did translation and publishing for some of the first Japanese RPGs ever released in English.
5. Rebecca Guay. She was there. I waved. I love her art.
6. Indianapolis. It's a really lovely city. Lots of neat parks and squares, very clean, interesting architechture. It's been a pleasure to bumble around in it.
7. Tomas the Lapidary. He was not only selling a whole lot of very beautiful metal and stone jewelry, but he had his grinder right there and was making pieces. We got talking and it was really interesting to learn a little bit about working with copper. Fun human interest story: He was working on a headpiece for a woman who'd requested something to wear for her wedding--it was beautiful, incidentally. She'd expected it to take a few months, so it was a bit of a shock when he told her to come back in a couple hours for it. He was brushing and buffing it when I saw it, and I happened to be there when the bride-to-be stopped back. He'd exceeded her expectations so much that she burst into tears. He patted her with his big leather-gloved hand. It was very sweet.
A+ Number One Highlight of Day One was the lecture on Medieval Food Preservation by Daniel Meyers. It was absolutely fascinating stuff--the man was a veritable encyclopedia of information, and the lecture ended up with a huge question and answer session that yielded all kinds of interesting tidbits. I jotted down several recipes and ideas he mentioned. As if going to the lecture wasn't good enough, we ran into him as we were wandering toward the car, and got talking some more about medieval cookery and recipes. The topic wandered all over Western Europe as we stood on a street corner, and eventually the three of us ended up wandering into a cushy hotel lobby and ordering drinks, and talking. It turns out he and his wife and family live fairly near us, and he's going to have us over and teach us some more hearty medieval recipes! He was a really great guy. I'm kind of ridiculously excited to have made such a neat friend who's such a well of knowledge.
A recipe to round the night out:
Snowe (no exact measurements, I'm afraid)
Whipping cream
egg whites
sugar
rose water--not the tiny perfume kind, the bigger bottles
Apparently if you add the egg whites to the cream, whip it, and add the sugar and rose water, it's just divine. As I was scribbling the recipe down, Ed started to ask if we were going to try making it. I nodded vigorously.
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