For the baking part of this challenge, I chose the Norwegian delicacy “school bread”, which is a bun with a dollop of custard, and then coconut frosting on the exposed bready parts.

I’m guessing it’s called that because it’s very sweet and kinda fulfilling, what with all the wheat, sugar and egg involved.

Not a whole lot of ingredients, really.

The dough is started by dissolving fresh yeast in sugary milk, and I don’t have a cooking thermometer (hey, hang on a bit… I do! I just forgot) so I used a laser temperature measuring thing. Body temp!

So that’s the dough…

And then there’s the custard which is egg and spices and milk and vanilla…

… that you heat up gently to thicken… The instructions in the recipe I was following were like “and then heat until it’s thickened BUT NEVER EVER LET IT BOIL OR GET ANYWHERE NEAR THAT TEMP BECAUSE YOU”LL DIE! YOUUUU”LLLL DIEEEEE, so I was standing there stirring for what felt like hours until I got bored and googled another recipe which said “oh, whatevs, if it starts boiling just pull it off the heat it don’t make no diffrence”, so I pumped up the heat and…

Presto! Custard! And no boiled yolk bits, but smooth and nice.

Wimpy recipes are annoying.

So you make buns and poke a hole in them were you want the custard to go…

… and then bake! Bake!

So then you cool them off and add some frosting and dip in coconut…

And that’s the end result. I went a bit hog wild with the custard — I think there’s never enough, but there’s too much on these, really.

So now I have the baking goods, and I need to pick an unread book from my the deepest recesses of my to-be-read bookcase. I pick…

El desorden de to nombre by Juan José Millás. Which means something like… er… The Unruly Name? I’m guessing! It probably has a title that Wikipedia can tell me… Hm… Nope…

Oh! “The Disorder of Your Name”. Not that far off. The Norwegian translation of the title means “Unknown Name”.

And that brings me to the reason this book has gone unread since I got it in about 1990:

It’s a translated book, and I have an antipathy towards translated books.

I do read a lot of translated works; I’m not an animal. People write fabulous stuff in all kinds of languages that I can’t read, and to not partake would be to deprive myself of some of the best books that exist. But still. Every time I crack open a translated book, I’m thinking to myself “How horrible is the translation going to be this time?”

And I’m not talking about a philosophical worry about the ontology of whatever, but really: How horrible is it going to be?

If you read any translated book published in the US, you’ll find the translator kvetching for pages and pages and pages about how difficult translations are, and that nothing can really be translated, and no words mean the same thing in any languages, and I understand why the translators put that shit in, because translated works in the US is a novelty: Less than one percent of books sold in the US are translated works. In civilised countries that’s probably like 50%.

I’m just guesstimating on the last bit.

So while the Americans are frittering about preserving nuances during translation (“Hm, maman isn’t quite mother but it’s not quite mummy either, oh! everything is so difficult, let me write a ten page ‘afterword from the translator’ because nobody has ever thought these thoughts before because I’m the first person to ever translate a book”), I’m worrying about how horrible it’s going to be, because most translated books are translated by nincompoops.

They don’t understand the language they’re translating from, and they’re horrible at writing the language they’re translating to.

“#notalltranslators”, I hear you twittering immediately, and that’s true. There are many wonderful translators that are great writers with an in-depth understanding of the language and culture they’re translating from. But that’s not the norm.

And the pair up there? Who did this book? They’re my bête noire.

(Er. What’s the plural of bête noire? I don’t speak French.)

They were amazingly productive in the 80s, and they fucked up book after book that I read. When its from a language that I can understand, whenever they write something really puzzling I can back-translate it into what it must have been in the original language and then I go “ah, that’s what the author meant. Not ‘Proceed, you punk rock musician, create daytime’, but ‘Go head, punk, make my day’. (I wish that was a made-up example.)

But with languages that I don’t understand, with these two my only option is to soldier on, not understanding what’s going on most of the time.

Ah! It’s published by Aschehoug. My sister worked for them at the time and got tons of free books, which is probably how this ended up with me…

So let’s see… “Over en kopp melkekaffe”… That means “over a cup of milk coffee”. So he’s drinking café con leche; i.e., latte?

*sigh*

This is going to be one of those translations, isn’t it?

The other really annoying thing about this pair of jokers is that they write Norwegian as if this were the 1940s, not the 1980s. It’s not just old word forms and stilted sentence structure, but their vocabulary is practically anachronistic in part.

And they’re well-regarded translators, really. They’ve won prizes and everything. Since I’m always right, that just goes to show how people-ey people are.

So how does the baking goods pair with the book?

Chomp chomp chomp. Well, it makes it better. I mean, Millás is pretty interesting anyway.

It’s a supremely 80s book; playing with and teasing the reader in all kinds of different ways. It’s somewhat metafictional, and the protagonist is (unusually enough) an editor at a publishing house. (Protagonists from this era are usually authors.) We get the recap from of a number of short stories he’s reading… but we never get the endings, because he’s too impatient.

It’s fun!

There are incomprehensible paragraphs, but it’s hard to say whether it’s because of a wretched translation or because Millás wanted those paragraphs to be incomprehensible. It’s still a thrilling read now and then.

[time passes]

I wrote the above after reading about half of the novel, and then it turned out that the protagonists starts writing a book… that has the plot… of this book, more or less.

So it checks all the clichés of mid-80s pomo literature. Which I love! It’s my favourite genre.

All thumbs up from me.

It’s Thursday, so I have to pick a book to read. Hickory dickory…

I choose The Two of Them by Joanna Russ.

Many of the books I’ve apparently avoided reading for two and a half decades have good reasons for not being read. This is not one of them.

I bought, at the time, all the books that Joanna Russ had written, and over the years (I try to avoid reading too many books by the same author in a short time period), I’ve read them all except this one.

I’ll let you read the first three pages before I comment.

So this is a typical 70s Joanna Russ book: It’s science fiction, it’s funny, it’s scathing, it dumps you straight into the storyline and lets the reader catch up the best they can.

Russ was a part of the new wave of sf writers in the 70s that wanted to bring the genre forward literally. Literally forward? I guess as part of this cohort were Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany and… Uhm… I forget. Both Butler and Delany are, of course, major favourites of mine, and I’ve read all their books, some of them several times. Delany even had a major, major best seller in Dhalgren (although I would guess it sold 10x as many copies as were read).

Indeed.

This is a quite straightforward sf novel, though. Two interplanetary agents go to a backward planet to er do something, and that’s as standard an sf plot you can get. The planet they go to here is basically Saudi Arabia, and Russ doesn’t so much try to file the serial numbers off as stamp them all over each page. There’s great glee to be had seeing Our Hero (or is she?) putting all those stupid misogynist ka’abalites in their place.

Which, of course, means that this book Would Be Frowned Upon By Twitter these days. Tsk tsk orientalism tsk tsk colonialism. It feels downright naughty to be reading this book.

The author gets involved at some points, imagining other ways the book could go. And it doesn’t really go where you’d think. It’s a thrilling reading experience, and Russ’ deft skill at confusion/anger is something to behold.

And now I’m sad that I have no further Russ books to read. She’s stopped writing now, right?

But I was gonna bake something. Let’s see… how about kransekake, which, in English, is called kransekake. English is such a rich language.

Or do I mean depraved? Deprived? All of them?

Anyway, the recipe is trivial: You mix almonds, sugar and egg whites and put it in the oven. However, there’s like some manual labour involved.

For instance, you have to (but you are) blanch the almonds, which I’ve never done before. You let the almonds steep in hot water for ten minutes, and then you spend half an hour watching MST3K (the new season) while drinking rum’n’coke while er shucking the almonds. It’s very relaxing.

*squeeze* *squeeze* *glug* *squeeze*

I don’t have a grinder, so I ran the almonds (half blanched (but you are) and half not) through a fud perfessor.

I googled around a bit and found a site that said you have to be careful not to run them too long because the almond oil will start separating out from the dry stuff, and you don’t want that. So they recommended running it half a minute, and then put the stuff through a sieve and then run it again.

And I thought… why would you run the sieved stuff again? It’s already flourish?

And while I was standing there shaking the strainer it hit me: They meant run the stuff that doesn’t make it through the sieve in the fud perfessor some more!

Thank you, thank you. No, I won’t accept your Stanford offer; I’ll just be sitting here waiting for the McArthur “Genius” Award people to send me my award.

So you roll out the dough into sausages and then put them into these round shapes. The recipe said “finger thick”, but I’ve got many fingers and some of them are way thicker than other fingers. And other people have bigger hands. And smaller hands!

WHY CAN”T RECIPES BE METRIC

Uhm… I wisely started in the middle of each one because running out of the top rings isn’t nice. They’re supposed to overlap when you build the tower after baking… I mean, I need the smallest rings from all the baking rings, and then the next-to-smallest ones…

I think? MacArthur?

Anyway, do you think these will increase in size much when baking? I wouldn’t think so? I mean, it’s just almonds, sugar and egg whites… I guess the egg whites might make them blow up somewhat, but not a lot? I think? I mean, they’re not whisked or anything?

AAAAAAAAA

Well, it’s good that I did one test first.

Back to the rolling board and roll some narrower ones.

Pop them in…

And… I think that’s pretty spot on? Except for how uneven they got? How can anybody roll with the required precision?

I was afraid they were gonna stick to the non-stick rings, but they didn’t. *phew*

Now there’s only decorating left…

D’oh.

I didn’t know that I had a grinding attachment to my Kenwood that I could have used to make the almond flour instead of the fud professor. I’ve never used it! It would have been an adventure!

Oh well.

After the rings have cooled way off, it time to build the tower.

You use regular glaze to glue the rings together.

Look! It’s a tower! Even if the rings came out way wobbly (and a bit overcooked).

And then… to decorate the cake. As it’s usually served around the Norwegian fourth of July (which happens in May in Norway), it’s usually very flaggy. Here’s a typical example:

But that seems so… uhm… I don’t know. You know.

Surprise reveal:

Unfortunately no stores around here were selling cocktail Anarchist flags (how could they have missed this market segment?), so I had to make them myself! Geez!

Printed out some…

Cut cut cut.

Glue glue glue.

Eating time!

You start at the bottom so that the tower doesn’t become stumpy.

So how does it pair with the book?

The crispy exterior along with the moist, chewy inside is a dialectic that fits the sf-angry exterior of the book with the feminist-angry chewy centre of the book.

Perfect!