BC&B: Terrine de Poireaux aux Lamelles de Truffes Michel Trama w/ Terrine aux Herbes de Provence Madame Cartet

It’s a new week, so it’s another couple of Patricia Wells recipes and a new book.

OK, for the starter this week, I’m doing this… terrine? Tell me you’re reading this recipe the same way I’m reading it: It’s a bunch of boiled leeks? (Leek? What’s the plural? One leek, two leek… probably with an s… I could look it up but that’s work.) And then pressed into a square for half a day in the fridge? And then served with a vinaigrette and truffles?

Like…

Wat.

Shouldn’t there be like more stuff in a terrine than 1) leek and 2) nothing else?

WELL OK

So here’s the ingredients.

The exciting thing about this recipe (for me), other than its risible simplicity, is that it has truffles! I’ve never even bought a truffle before! So I went to the delicatessen and asked “do… you have truffles?” And she said “Yes! We had two yesterday!” and there was one left, and I got it?

It’s not a thing commonly used in Norwegian er cuisine.

I guess it’s in a little box with rice? To keep it dry?

Well OK.

So I’ve trimmed the leeks…

… and then into well-salted water for ten minutes.

I bought that 35cm (that’s 13 inches for you non-metric people) pot a couple of years ago, because I was fed up with having to bend spaghetti down into a smaller pot. THE INSANITY MUST STOP!!! I thought, so I got this thing, and I’m so happy I got it (every time I’m boiling spaghetti): It’s quite low, so I can sample the spaghetti as it’s boiling with just a normal fork…

ANYWAY! It’s also perfect for these leeks, and it’s the first time I found something else to use it for.

And then I let some cold water run over the leeks to chill…

And then into a foil-lined bread form, because that’s the only thing I had that’s square and long. Except my head.

As you can see, I just got four leeks, while the recipe calls for twelve of them, because… I don’t want to be eating leeks for the next nine weeks.

All bundled up, and then into the fridge for the next day.

So while that’s resting, let’s pick a book… not many to choose from; just a couple to go now.

The book of the er day is Christianna Brand’s Tour de Force. I first became aware of her last year when I watched Green for Danger, which is a very witty movie based on one of her books. It was so witty that I bought three of her books immediately, and read one of them. It was very witty indeed.

So here’s another one. Let’s read the first three pages together:

This is very witty!

I love how Brand dumps us into a classic mystery setup — a group of people (who do not know each other) on a tourist trip abroad. She quickly pencils in the different personalities: We have a gay clothes designer; a very witty novelist (gotta have one of those); a grouchy policeman (can’t do without); and a bunch of others — presumably one of these others will then be killed off, and the mystery can start.

So we’re not talking Huge Original Masterpiece here, but I find Brand’s style of writing here irresistible. There’s such an exuberance to it: I can picture Brand cackling maniacally behind her (presumed) mechanical typewriter with every clever turn of phrase and bouncing up and down on her chair when introducing a mid-paragraph twist.

Brand isn’t one for killing off her darlings. She’s more likely to pat them on their heads and then send them off to the Riviera.

She does love leading the reader up the garden path. She almost tends towards the oblique, and you have to pay attention to her longer-than-usual-for-this-sort-of-stuff sentences, but she always reins it in and lands it successfully.

This book is simply!

There’s even a map! It’s perfect!

OK, I’m definitely buying all of her books now. There’s unfortunately less than a couple dozen, apparently, and most of them are out of print. It’s a disgrace.

But what’s for the main course?

It’s a terrine! With a lot of ingredients! I like that. I mean, whenever I see a long list of ingredients, I’m like “whee this is gonna be fun”.

But it turns out that most of the ingredients are herbs. Dried herbs at that, so I basically had most of the ingredients already. And I got to use the summer savory, which I got from the UK a couple of months ago. It’s not a herb used much here…

And this recipe has white wine, port wine, and cognac. Gotta be awesome!

The recipe specifies ground pork neck and pork liver… and I couldn’t find pork liver at the delicatessen, so it’s just ground pork meat.

And… I forgot to buy shallots, so I substituted these tiny onions I had instead. And one shallot.

Hey! Chopping onions in a FUD professor is really efficient.

So that’s stirred into the group meat…

And then I had to open the port wine. I bought a nice port today, and… THE CORK DISINTEGRATED WHILE OPENING!!!1!

Well, I managed to get the port out, and it didn’t taste awful (it tasted very nice indeed), so I decided to use it.

Some of the spices need to be ground, so I used the Kenwood spice grinder attachment.

It worked!

That’s a lot of spices and herbs. I think there’s… eight? And plenty of every one?

So that’s all mixed.

Here’s another thing I’ve never cooked with before: Lardo. (Or fatback, as Patricia Wells calls it.)

It’s fat, dude.

Fat.

So I line the bottom of the pan with the lardo… Wells specified a square pan, but I didn’t have one of the requisite size.

And then the meat’n’spice thing patted down…

… and then bacon on top.

Wells specified “caul fat”, which sounds just gruesome, so I didn’t even try to find out what it’s called here. But she mentioned that “mild bacon” would be a substitute, so I ordered some non-smoked, fat bacon… and when it was delivered, it was smoked, very non-fat bacon.

I”M NOT COMPLAINING:

HONEST! I”D NEVER! I”M JUST EXPLAINING!!1!

Anyway, it turns out that this is a meat loaf? I’ve never made meat loaf before, so I was somewhat surprised that this is what I’m ending up with, because it sounds better in French! Anyway, so it’s in the oven, in a pan filled with water.

Wow, that’s blurry. What did the camera focus on?

The recipe said two to two and a half hours; it’s done when, as Wells puts it, when you stick a knife in it for 30 seconds, and when you pull it out, the blade is warm.

I though that sounded kinda unnecessarily vague, so I googled it, and google says 70C.

So I stuck a thermometer into it after an hour… and it’s already 80C!!! GAH! It’s like making a half-size recipe makes it cook in half the time! WHO KNEW!

I verified with another thermometer.

It’s done. But is it over-done?

Oops! The recipe specifies that it’s supposed to rest in the fridge for at least a day. BUT I”M HUNGRY NOW.

I should really read these recipes before I start cooking instead of just the list of ingredients…

So since the end of this cookery came kinda fast, I didn’t have time to make any salad or anything, so I’m just eating it hot with some bread.

Hm…

The first few bites I thought were delicious. But then … all the different herbs and spices just kinda seemed to be… less complex than just confusing? It’s all these vague flavours without anything that stands out.

But it wasn’t overly dry or anything… So I didn’t totally ruin it, I guess?

I preferred the bread and the butter to the meat loaf, and that’s not a good thing.

So that’s what’s left after I finished eating, so I continue with the recipe, which is to let it chill while being compressed.

Is this compressed enough? When it’s cool enough, I’ll pop it into the fridge and then see what it tastes like tomorrow.

[two days pass]

So I’m eating the leeks first, so I have to make a vinaigrette. It’s just lemon juice and oil and salt & pepper. And truffle shavings.

Hm… er… what is this? This is the truffle I bought, but all the truffles I’ve had in restaurants have been black inside? Is this a white truffle? It’s also got a very … grainy texture…

But I snacked a bit, and it does taste like truffle. Only a lot less. Hm.

So that’s the vinaigrette…

So the leeks are out of the fridge, and I’m cutting.

That’s a long name for a very simple dish! You can’t even see it under all that text…

So here it is without the text.

Hm… Well, if I got this as a starter in a restaurant, I wouldn’t be mad. The leeks have developed a fuller flavour, and taste like… asparagus? It’s kinda towards asparagus territory. And the vinaigrette and the truffles do add something.

I like it. But it’s not like OH WOW I CAN”T BELIEVE IT; it’s more like “yes this is a starter and I’m not disappointed”.

(Yes, I’m typing this after drinking a bottle of wine. Whee!)

But I’m wondering what that truffle thing is…

“Tuber aestivum Vittad”.

That’s it:

The flavor, size and color of summer truffles (Italian: tartufo estivo) is similar to that of burgundy truffles, but their aroma is less intense and the flesh (gleba) is a paler hazel color.

OK, so the ones I’ve had in restaurants have must have been burgundy truffles, I guess.

“Less intense” is an understatement. At least for this one truffle I have: It does smell like a truffle, but it’s very subtle.

OK!

Onto the meaty terrine:

Yeah, that totally looks appetising.

NOT!

So I cut a bit…

And here it is on the plate.

Well… The texture is quite nice; very terriney. But the flavours are still the same; haven’t developed much over the two days in the fridge. That is, the spices are still kinda off-putting. When I’m taking a bite, I’m thinking “there’s at least a couple of flavours here that shouldn’t be here”.

Could some of my dried spices have gone off and gone bad? Is that even possible? Herbs usually just taste less instead of bad…

Oh, well. It was fun to make.

This blog post is part of the Bistro
Cooking & Books series.

Some Bergman Youtube

Some years ago, I watched a whole bunch of stuff by Ingmar Bergman. As a result, I was sitting on a pile of really obscure things that I had acquired from various sources that I uploaded to Youtube a few years later.

I then uploaded a bunch of subtitles and translated one of the pieces myself, before deciding that that’s, like, too much work. But I did switch on “community contributions”, and subtitles have trickled in… slowly. For instance, today I discovered that somebody had subtitled Storm Weather in English. Not because Youtube notified me, nope — Youtube sends me mail about everything else, but not that there’s a new subtitle in my approval queue *sigh* — but because I logged into that account just to a periodic check.

Please do contribute more translations, even if it takes a while to get them approved.

But as it’s been half a year since I uploaded all this stuff, I thought it might be … interesting? … to do an update on how this is, like, going?

First of all, I had expected the channel to be hit with a bunch of copyright strikes and everything removed immediately. That didn’t happen. Instead, the copyright holder to the majority of these pieces, SVT (Swedish Television) have just filed copyright claims, like:

That’s very nice of them. They’ve also trickled in over a number of months, which means that there’s probably some poor person at SVT going through the videos manually and filing these claims. Hi!

It also means that about half the videos are blocked from viewing… in Sweden. So if you’re in Sweden, use a VPN to pretend you’re anywhere else if you want to watch the videos.

But:

There’s also been three copyright strikes. The first had fortunately expired before the other two arrived, but it just takes one more and all the videos are gone. The second strike will expire in two weeks, though.

But in case the channel goes AWOL, I have downloaded the videos (with subtitles) so that everybody’s hard work is preserved and can be restored…

Arrrr. It’s the pirate life for us.

I guess I’m both surprised and … not surprised at the channel still being up. I did expect to be hit with more automated copyright claims, but that’s apparently only a thing with music and not theatre and the like? On the other hand, the commercial value of these things is probably approx. zilch — it’s obscure ephemera only of interest to a very select group of people:

Anyway. Looks like at least some people find something of interest there, and I hope that more people add subtitles and translation. It helps if you can understand Swedish, I guess.

ELC1995: Skin Tight Orbit

Skin Tight Orbit vols 1 & 2 by Elaine Lee and various, published by NBM/Amerotica.

The US direct sales comics market has been through so many upheavals since it started in the late 70s. It always seems to be either going through a huge growth spurt or a catastrophic downturn? The reason I’m mentioning this is that this is published by one of NBMs imprints for porn I mean erotica.

NBM is, of course, one of the most respected publishers of serious, quality comics in the US. (Well, or they would be if everybody didn’t keep forgetting that they exists.) So what’s up with the erotica I mean porn imprints?

Fantagraphics Comics was probably the trailblazer here: During the previous crisis (1990), Fantagraphics established Eros Comix, and the stated goal of the imprint was to bring in as much money as possible so that Fantagraphics could continue publishing the good stuff. As a publisher of quality non-porn comics, you’d assume that they’d publish quality porn comics, right? No. They sometimes accidentally published somebody good under the imprint (like Molly Kiely), but since that wasn’t really the mission statement, there seemed to be no lower bound to how unreadable the dreck they’d shovel out could be: It just had to sell.

Some unfortunate things were published.

NBM was pretty much in the same boat, and they started their Eurotica imprint in 1991, and Amerotica in 1995 (yes, we were already in the next comics industry crisis now).

So I approached this book with some trepidation, because I have no idea what approach NBM were taking with their porn I mean erotica comics: Attempting to publish good stuff, or Just Whatever Sells?

(Oh, Here’s an explanation of what this blog series is.)

Let’s read the first three pages of Skin Tight Orbit.

Well, this looks promising… it’s seems like it’s going to have some humour, and best of all, it’s sci-fi.

But is that really William Michael Kaluta!? I couldn’t tell at all from looking at the artwork; it’s the least Kaluta-like Kaluta artwork I’ve ever seen.

(The story ends with a pretty obvious twist ending, but it’s well told.)

Mary Wilshire illustrates three short pieces about sex androids, and they grow progressively sadder. I mean, it’s on purpose, but it’s not very sexy.

Will Simpson illustrates a story about two er astronauts that change bodies: Her mind in his body and the opposite.

It ends with a horrific rape and murder.

Hang on. Wasn’t this supposed to be a porn I mean erotic book?

Here’s what the back cover says:

“Horny stuff”… “hot collection of erotic science fiction”. The story with the mind swap and subsequent rape and murder is described as “the most intense story”. Well… yes, it is, but…

But is it porn!?!? IS IT PORN!?!?

Is this one of those “I know what porn I mean art is when I see it” things?

Phil Winslade’s artwork gave me a brain aneurysm, but is actually quite porny and was originally printed in Heavy Metal (while most of the other stories seem to be made especially for these books). Well… quite porny except for the horrific ending.

I think it’d be easier to classify these books as sci-fi horror instead of erotica. A fair number of them are gruesome, or at least ambiguous, like this Ray Lago-illustrated story about a guy dying from oxygen deprivation (I think that’s what was going on).

Perhaps the most gruesome of them all is this Jim Sherman-illustrated story of slimey tentacle rape… and that’s the final panel: This is tentacle rape for all eternity.

Several of the stories are about virtual reality/gaming. Above we have a guy in a VR suit living out his sex/accidental necrophilia dreams, apparently…

We have one very sad married couple, each with their own VR setup.


And one with a VR sex worker, who has as a speciality forcing the men who pay her to rape her (in VR, of course).

Fortunately, there’s one lighthearted story in the book: It’s about a species that have human-like women, and where the males are these tentacle parasites that only live to have sex with the women. I’m not showing you any of the tentacle porn images. Hah!

So.

I rather liked these books. The scenarios are surprising and interesting, and Lee is witty. The artwork ranges from passable to really good; there’s an emphasis on storytelling rather than just doing pin-ups, which is refreshing for a porn I mean erotica book.

But… c’mon. It’s a horror anthology. It probably wouldn’t have sold any copies if marketed as that, so I understand why NBM marketed it as an Amerotica book.

The books have never been reprinted, apparently, and I’m unable to find anybody on ver interboobs that admit to having read them.

ELC1990: Starstruck: The Expanding Universe

Starstruck: The Expanding Universe #1-4 by Elaine Lee, William Michael Kaluta, published by Dark Horse.

I wasn’t going to do any Starstruck-related stuff in this blog series, but it occurred to me that I had the Dark Horse series, and it might be interesting to read it and compare it to the IDW collected edition.

(Oh, Here’s an explanation of what this blog series is. And I wrote about Starstruck here.)

First we get a somewhat revisionist history by Mark Askwith — Archie Goodwin didn’t “commission” the first Starstruck graphic novel so much as reprint it: It first appeared as a serial in Heavy Metal.

But we’re told what this series is: It’s an expanded version of the graphic novel, the Epic series, and then presumably what was supposed to come after the first six issues of the Epic series (which had originally been planned as a 12-issue series).

Let’s see… the graphic novel was about 72 pages long, and the Epic series was about (* 6 30) => 180 pages long, so that’s *gets slide rule out* 250 pages. And they propose to add 320 pages, so it’s going to be more than twice as long as originally published? Right. Let’s look at the versions..

Above is the first page of the graphic novel..

And then the first page of the Expanding Universe series…

… and finally the first page of the collected version published by IDW in 2011. (Yes, I’ve got the floppy IDW version, too, but I think that’s the same as the collected version. (No, I’m not obsessed! Shut up! No you shut up!))

Famously, the IDW version is in comic book ratio (higher or narrower than the magazine/graphic novel ratio), so Kaluta (with Lee Moyer on colours) had to elongate the artwork on all the pages reprinted from the graphic novel. Here he’s just added an almost-repeat row to the bottom, but they use a large number of techniques, like making panels taller, or adding more space, etc.

And then these are the next pages from the graphic novel…

But these are the next pages from the Expanding Universe! These are new pages! So they did the new pages in the graphic novel ratio, even if the book is printed in comic book ratio? Perhaps they were aiming for a final collected edition that was all in graphic novel ratio?

I had assumed the IDW version was in comic book ratio because the new pages from the Expanding Universe edition were in that format, but… nope.

So even these pages have to be elongated.

Then we’re back to the graphic novel pages…

(here in biggenated version) again. It’s pretty seamless! Of course, Kaluta’s artwork has more of a 70s flair in the original version… the hairdos are just a bit more … soft.

The printing in the Dark Horse edition leaves something to be desired. Sure, it’s printed in a smaller format than it was drawn for, but even so, the lines have a tendency to disappear into nothingness…

Basically, the Dark Horse version covers the same stretch of storyline as the graphic novel, and then adds the first issue of the Epic series. That’s ~100 pages originally, and this version is 200 pages long, so that’s 100 new pages.

So what’s on these pages, then? I mean, the original graphic novel was a great, fun, exhilarating ride. It basically… makes things clearer? I know that sounds like the most boring thing ever, and there are a couple of scenes (like the above) where the characters are talking about things that we already know (if we’ve been paying attention).

Fortunately, these explanatory pages are mostly confined to the start of the series, and then we instead get the backgrounds on Galatia 9/Bruscilla the Muscle (and other characters. It’s not that these are vital to the plot, but they’re really fun, interesting reading in and of themselves.

The IDW edition is (except the enlongening) page for page identical with the Dark Horse edition: The dialogue is the same, and everything happens in the same order. There’s basically nothing new, except somewhat minor things like the heading on the page above.

… which has gotten a date stamp and a quote in the IDW version.

And, of course, we get the infamous dictionary entries that Starstruck has had since the Epic days. I love them. They often fill out details, or make connections between characters that you may not have already made. They… broaden and deepen the Starstruck universe without being a cop-out: They aren’t pages of text that you need to read to understand what’s going on; everything you need to know is in the comic itself, if you just pay attention. These are just extra fun bits.

And, if you really piece together what’s happening, the recaps by Lee Moyer are very lucid and to the point.

I guess kids these days may not get that panel, what with people probably more used to seeing themselves in selfies than in mirrors, but I just love that detail of Molly Medea above imagining herself as she sees herself in the mirror. (Not reversed scar.)

Anyway, I didn’t really plan on re-reading the series for real, like, but just look at the edition, but again I found myself engrossed in the book. It’s just such a perfect comic book. Kaluta’s artwork never fails to impress: It’s gorgeous through and through, and so inventive, but it’s also so damned readable. The storytelling chops are out of this world, especially considering how much this series is about identities and self, which means that you have a bunch of characters that look (on purpose) very similar… and yet it’s never confusing. (Except when it’s meant to be.)

And reading it this way, comparing and contrasting editions, you’d think would take all the fun out of it. But it totally doesn’t, because it’s already a work that you really have to stop and think and go “but wasn’t… yes! hah! hah!” a couple of times per page, so all these editions just makes it even more of a fun puzzle.

Oh, I said that the IDW version was identical? I lied. There’s (I think) three totally new pages, and they’re mostly like that page on the left. (I looks like filler, but it does totally make sense in context.)

That means that we get a different left/right page dynamic on many of the spreads, but I think that perhaps the IDW spreads are slightly better.

Oh! Suddenly a new page in comic book dimensions? Odd.

And then… we run out of graphic novel pages.

Here’s the final graphic novel page.

And here’s the first Epic Comics page, so we continue straight onto the Epic Comics version.

Trading cards? Well, it was the 90s, I guess…

Anyway, the additional pages stop when we reach the Epic Comics portion in the final issue (which is 64 pages long; the others are 48 pages). So all the additional 100 pages went into the graphics novel expansion.

Except… the page above which was added to the end…

Which is sort of mashed up with an original Epic page. It does help with the flow a bit, because the wax guy came in a bit abruptly originally.

Anyway, I’m guessing that means that the next four issues would mostly reprint the remaining five Epic issues, and then we’d finally get the continuation in the final four issues?

I don’t know. It’d make sense?

Instead we had to wait until 2015, when Lee and Kaluta published the kickstartered Old Proldiers Never Die, which does indeed reprint the remaining Epic issues, but I haven’t done a comparative reading, so I don’t know how much it expands upon it.

Indeed.

Anyway: The more I read Starstruck, the more I love it, and I already loved it to bits the first time I set my eyes on it.

If you haven’t read these books yet, hie thee over to bookshop.org.