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possibly a load of cobblers
Thursday, 9 July 2009 10:07 amTwo things I realise I love, God wot: (a) hanging around with geeks, and (b) the Oxford English Dictionary. The other day at Jo's game Jean made a beef cobbler for supper: that's the supremely British dish with a sort of stewey thing topped with scone dough. It's all the best kinds of British cold-weather stodgy goodness, with a side order of self-indulgence and arteries-going-clang. Fired with emulatory1 enthusiasm, I constructed one last night and presented it to the Evil Landlord for supper. He did his usual suspicious-German act, prodded it a bit, muttered things about misshapen alien fungi over bubbling lava pits, and then demanded to know why it was called a cobbler. I hazarded a guess that it was something to do with being cobbled together haphazardly out of bits. Then, being fundamentally a geek, I researched it.
The OED is generally a dry, wordy, knowledgeable god, although actually not entirely to be trusted on cooking terms. (Mad SCA cooks are often able to spot mis-attributions, misunderstandings and, quite often, earlier cites than those the OED has dredged up for certain medieval cooking terms). For a start, the OED has no idea where the term originates, and spurns with a slightly inexplicable disdain the notion of a root verb meaning "to join". Apparently a cobbler is also "a drink made of wine, sugar, lemon, and pounded ice, and imbibed through a straw or other tube", which strikes me as being a recipe for sweet, sweet, hiccuping drunkenness. (Dickens refers to "sherry cobbler", which has to be murder through a straw). The OED food definition, however, cites only the fruit version, with an 1859 cite describing "A sort of pie, baked in a pot lined with dough of great thickness, upon which the fruit is placed; according to the fruit, it is an apple or a peach cobbler". Subsequent examples reflect the more modern version, which has inverted it so that the dough (still of great thickness) goes on top. This food history page finds an earlier cite (1839), still American and fruity rather than meaty.
The failure of the OED to reflect the actually very common English usage for a dough-topped stew or casserole is, I have to say, fairly characteristic. So now I am left sort of semi-informed, and with a terrible urge to go and acquire a bunch of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cookbooks so I can track the damned thing down definitively. (It's not in Mrs. Beeton. Phooey. And I forgot to dig through Elizabeth David last night, owing to thing.) I have a deep, dark, partisan sort of feeling that the British meat cobbler predates the American fruit cobbler, but I may simply be prejudiced.
Today's entry in Random Ginormous Fantasy Series Month is a sort of semi-diss, mostly because I recently re-read it and it didn't stand up at all well. Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry series was one of my huge favourites when I was a young, naive Masters student. It's a terribly post-Tolkienien fantasy realm, complete with Elves, Dwarves and Sauron-analogues, with additional world-hopping by people from our world. It's rather nicely rooted in Celtic and Arthurian mythology, including gods, and Kay is pleasingly able to off main characters satisfyingly and inevitably when the plot calls for it. But, ye gods! the man's writing style! It's an early work of his and I didn't find the same degree of irritation in his most recent one, Ysabel, which I really enjoyed; but Fionavar is all about the Torrid! Portentuous! Adjectival! Overwriting!, mostly in great crumbling flights of sentences all starting with "And". Emotionally overwrought doesn't even begin to cover it. Thank the borrowed Celtic gods he Got Better. And it's a great pity, because the world of the series is beautiful, compelling and mythically rich.
In a nutshell: elves, dwarves, goblins, Big Bad Evil, epic battle, epic romance, loss, love, rape, seduction, politics. Emotionally overwrought. Sexy gods and goddesses, sex with same, resulting conflicted half-gods. Dragons, heroes, seers, kings, princes, monsters, thundering herds of sort of deer. Doomed love triangles across time and space. Emotionally overwrought.
The OED is generally a dry, wordy, knowledgeable god, although actually not entirely to be trusted on cooking terms. (Mad SCA cooks are often able to spot mis-attributions, misunderstandings and, quite often, earlier cites than those the OED has dredged up for certain medieval cooking terms). For a start, the OED has no idea where the term originates, and spurns with a slightly inexplicable disdain the notion of a root verb meaning "to join". Apparently a cobbler is also "a drink made of wine, sugar, lemon, and pounded ice, and imbibed through a straw or other tube", which strikes me as being a recipe for sweet, sweet, hiccuping drunkenness. (Dickens refers to "sherry cobbler", which has to be murder through a straw). The OED food definition, however, cites only the fruit version, with an 1859 cite describing "A sort of pie, baked in a pot lined with dough of great thickness, upon which the fruit is placed; according to the fruit, it is an apple or a peach cobbler". Subsequent examples reflect the more modern version, which has inverted it so that the dough (still of great thickness) goes on top. This food history page finds an earlier cite (1839), still American and fruity rather than meaty.
The failure of the OED to reflect the actually very common English usage for a dough-topped stew or casserole is, I have to say, fairly characteristic. So now I am left sort of semi-informed, and with a terrible urge to go and acquire a bunch of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cookbooks so I can track the damned thing down definitively. (It's not in Mrs. Beeton. Phooey. And I forgot to dig through Elizabeth David last night, owing to thing.) I have a deep, dark, partisan sort of feeling that the British meat cobbler predates the American fruit cobbler, but I may simply be prejudiced.
Today's entry in Random Ginormous Fantasy Series Month is a sort of semi-diss, mostly because I recently re-read it and it didn't stand up at all well. Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry series was one of my huge favourites when I was a young, naive Masters student. It's a terribly post-Tolkienien fantasy realm, complete with Elves, Dwarves and Sauron-analogues, with additional world-hopping by people from our world. It's rather nicely rooted in Celtic and Arthurian mythology, including gods, and Kay is pleasingly able to off main characters satisfyingly and inevitably when the plot calls for it. But, ye gods! the man's writing style! It's an early work of his and I didn't find the same degree of irritation in his most recent one, Ysabel, which I really enjoyed; but Fionavar is all about the Torrid! Portentuous! Adjectival! Overwriting!, mostly in great crumbling flights of sentences all starting with "And". Emotionally overwrought doesn't even begin to cover it. Thank the borrowed Celtic gods he Got Better. And it's a great pity, because the world of the series is beautiful, compelling and mythically rich.In a nutshell: elves, dwarves, goblins, Big Bad Evil, epic battle, epic romance, loss, love, rape, seduction, politics. Emotionally overwrought. Sexy gods and goddesses, sex with same, resulting conflicted half-gods. Dragons, heroes, seers, kings, princes, monsters, thundering herds of sort of deer. Doomed love triangles across time and space. Emotionally overwrought.
1 Why does that sound as though it should have something to do with emus?
