Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Saturday, April 02, 2005
SMRREBRD
The other night, our wonderful Icelandic neighbors, happy to see the lights on again in our house, invited us for dinner. H. had just returned from Iceland, laden with foodstuffs. On the phone he told us he was cooking fish, but when we arrived he said, no, it was going to be smrrebrd.
“Sit!” he commanded, filling small glasses with ice-cold akvavit and larger ones with our choice of beer or white wine. And out of the kitchen, with a flourish, came two platters of the most beautiful composed sandwiches I have ever seen, of a special, dense, Danish rye bread spread with butter, and then topped with veritable sculptures of appropriately combined shrimp, hard-boiled eggs, an Icelandic liver pate topped with slices of port-wine aspic, marinated herring, salami, onions, and Icelandic caviar, garnished with sprigs of fresh dill. I especially love herring, and the caraway-flavored aquavit was the perfect accompaniment. It was, in a word, a feast.
Smrrebrd is the Icelandic word for smorgasbord. Looking up “smorgasbord” to make sure I was spelling it correctly, the dictionary confirmed H. and E.’s explanation that the word means bread (brd) and butter (smrre). The word smorgasbord is Swedish; the origin of its first half is the Old Norse word smör or smjör , meaning fat or butter. (It’s no leap to realize that’s the source of our English word “smear”.) But it’s interesting that smorgasbord -- originally a selection of these beautifully composed sandwiches -- has come to mean a buffet, with a large selection of unrelated dishes –anything from cold lobster to baked beans. More generically, we've come to use the word to mean a mixture or even a “hodgepodge” -- which is not at all a description of the culinary artworks we ate that night.
4:47 PM
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Friday, April 01, 2005
BUSY, BUSY
As I guess is fairly obvious, I've been pretty occupied this week without much time for writing (well, I've been writing, as part of a big project I'm in charge of, but that's rather different.) I feel like I've hardly looked around myself since coming back down here, although for the first time since winter began I was able to take a walk around my garden and check on the plants - always a happy occasion. I found two roses that I'm worried about (standard for northern New England - you just take your chances with roses unless you are willing to bury them each fall, even the rugosas sometimes succumb), and the crack in the trunk of the weeping Siberian peaberry seems larger, but other than that everybody looks like they made it through the winter - reddish-brown tulip shoots are up, the Oriental poppies are growing little soft tufts of leaves, and the daylilies are poking green leaf-tips through the thawing snow and mud. It's too early to rake the leaves off the perennial beds - we had sleet last night - but it won't be long now. On the drive down here we saw many flocks of migrating geese, including one group of snow geese over a Canadian cornfield. Now I can hear redwing blackbirds calling in the trees outside, and the robins are bouncing around in back of the house, looking for worms. Q.E.D.
One of my top priorities, besides the ruthless purge of our bookshelves we've vowed to do this spring and the replacement of the curling linoleum floor tiles in our bathroom, is to move my blog and finally get off Blogger. I'm really distressed about the slow loading times and the ridiculous problems accessing the Blogger site and then losing posts during publication (which of course wouldn't be so bad if I remembered to copy them first, or write them in a word processor). I've started a non-public shadow-blog on Typepad to see how I like it, but I'd be grateful for your suggestions about various weblog software and hosting services. I'd especially like to hear from Typepad users about your experiences with managing comment spam, which (knock on the old maple chair) has not been a problem for me so far.
5:08 PM
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Wednesday, March 30, 2005
EASTER BREAD FOLLOW-UP
Here is a Portugese recipe that sounds like the same thing as the basket-shaped, egg-bearing breads I photographed at Easter. In this case, uncooked eggs are pressed int the dough and baked just like that, along with the bread. I also looked through some Greek recipes for traditional Easter bread, and those use red-dyed, hardboiled eggs that are also placed on top of the dough prior to baking.
I'm dubious but I guess I'll just have to try it, and hope I don't end up with exploded egg all over my oven! Not one of these recipes talked about piercing the eggshell first.
5:21 PM
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BOOK MEME
A week or more ago, my friend Marja-Leena asked me to contribute to this meme, and I got all consumed with work and travel and forgot to even write back. So here is my apology (sorry, M-L, and thank you for asking me!) and an attempt at a response:
You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be? Sorry, I've never read it.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? Yes. Laurie in Little Women/Little Men. Rennie in the Jalna series (we’re really getting back there in time now.) Dr. Zhivago (which had more to do with Omar Sharif than the actual book, I’m afraid).
The last book you bought is? Le Premier Siecle après Beatrice, by Amin Maalouf
What are you currently reading? The Maalouf. Confessions of an Igloo Dweller by John Houston. Two Solitudes by Hugh MacLennan.
Five books you would take to a deserted island: 1. The Iliad 2. Collected Poems, Czeslaw Milosz 3. Oxford Book of American Verse 4. Collected Works of William Shakespeare (we’re going for length and re-readability here) 5. A Bible (maybe) or The Book of Common Prayer (although I probably have much of the latter memorized – I’d take it as a hedge against going completely insane). Or maybe Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier or a book of Beethoven sonatas, for playing air piano. (This is a rough choice.)
Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why? Maria, poet and writer, of eclectic tastes, who will make wonderful choices qB, because I'm guessing she’ll choose some quirky things far less boring than my "classics" Language Hat, who reads more than any of us but rarely reveals anything very personal. I'm not sure if he'll respond but I'm hoping he will.
3:43 PM
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Sunday, March 27, 2005
HAPPY EASTER
Happy Easter, happy spring to everyone. These beautiful breads were in the window of a Portugese bakery on St. Laurent - they represent the cross, obviously, but the cross with resurrection in the form of colored eggs that are baked, whole in their shells, into the basket-form of the bread. Sorry the photo isn't better - there were too many reflections in the the window.
We're off to church; after digging through my closet I finally found a pink sweater to wear instead of my winter wardrobe of mostly black and grey wooly things. More later. But I hope the sun shines on you today.
9:11 AM
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