lies and truth

I posted a few weeks ago about Florentine omelette, a recipe we really liked, after I saw it mentioned in a book (neither of us had heard of it previously).

Florentine or à la Florentine is a term from classic French cuisine that refers to dishes that typically include a base of cooked spinach, a protein component and Mornay sauce. Chicken Florentine is the most popular version. Because Mornay sauce is a derivation of béchamel sauce which includes roux and requires time and skill to prepare correctly, many contemporary recipes use simpler cream-based sauces.

A Florentine omelette doesn't have Mornay sauce; it's just an omelette with spinach and cheese filling (parmesan and gruyere traditional). However, eggs Florentine is a common café/diner dish from the UK and Australia, a breakfast sandwich with a poached egg, spinach, and sauce on an English muffin. (People seem to expect Hollandaise instead of a Mornay sauce in that case.) Chicken Florentine might be the oldest version: that idea is out there, but it might be apocryphal too. The history of the term and the style is colorful but probably not accurate:

Culinary lore attributes the term to 1533, when Catherine de Medici of Florence married Henry II of France. She supposedly brought a staff of chefs, lots of kitchen equipment and a love of spinach to Paris, and popularized Florentine-style dishes. Food historians have debunked this story, and Italian influence on French cuisine long predates this marriage.[4] Pierre Franey considered this theory apocryphal, but embraced the term Florentine in 1983.[5] Auguste Escoffier included a recipe for sole Florentine in his 1903 classic Le guide culinaire, translated into English as A Guide to Modern Cookery.

(Quotes from Wikipedia, Florentine (culinary term))

Because Chicken Florentine was trendy in the US in the mid 20th century, the popular English-language versions of the recipe have suffered from simplification. Recipes from the midcentury reportedly used mushroom soup. Modern ones overwhelmingly use cream instead of Mornay sauce; it was necessary to put "Mornay" in the search terms before I found any recipes with it (because 1. it's not hard to make a roux, like what are you talking about? & 2. we wanted to try the more authentic recipe). We looked at three and used this one because the Mornay sauce called for wine, mustard powder, and nutmeg. We didn't use gruyere, though, just parmesan, and served it over white rice and it was sooooooo good. So delicious.

Tristana never misses an opportunity to eat hair. She can't have toys with feathers, and she has to be watched like a hawk when I'm brushing or grooming bunnies, because she will stalk the balls of discarded fur with a surprising amount of tenacity and sneakiness. She frequently manages to steal tiny tufts of bunny fur from the edges of doorways that Rowan passes through (which always accumulate a small fringe of faintly-waving fronds every few days if I don't clean them off), but since bunny grooming is a discrete activity that requires a lot of attention, it is usually possible to simply carry the fur away and put it in a closed trash can that she can't reach without incident (although there have been past incidents with her stealing fur from the trashcan, but she's never managed to get very much).

So half an hour ago Tristana started being both extremely distressed and moderately distressing: ( cw: vomit )

(When picturing a ping-pong-sized ball of fur, recall that Tristana, while fully grown, is tiny. She was a runt and never fully made up for two weeks as an infant when she didn't gain weight. She weighed 2.3 kg or about 5 lb last year, and she is slim and wiry, the typical bundle-of-twigs/greyhoundish Oriental breed build.)

She's finished regurgitating now, and we put a bowl of clean water and the turtle bed, opened up so she could crawl inside, on the heated floor of the upstairs bathroom for her, and she immediately slunk in there to think about her misfortunes. I mean, to feel sorry for herself, not to analyze; I doubt she has any idea the fur-eating was related to her current distress.

But backing up to about midday today, earlier I had brushed Rowan and then neatly rolled up the excess fluff into a ball like I always do; but instead of carrying it into the kitchen and hiding it in the trash under the sink where Tristana couldn't get it, I left it on top of the trashcan because I was going to come right back and use the same trashbag to change the liners in the bunny litterboxes. I was going to put the soiled paper on top of the fur, so it would have been just as inaccessible. However, I got distracted and forgot.

So this is actually kind of an ADHD tax.

I can't get excited about fandom right now, or at least can't find a fandom to get excited about right now, but I can always get excited about the history of the decorative arts.

I've been reading vintage magazines to try to immerse myself more in the worldview, the history, and the language of the period I love most (centered on 1920s, but including the whole between-wars period, the Golden Age of detective fiction, etc), and the last few weeks of browsing and reading Vogue and Harper's Bazar; Ladies' Home Journal, Woman's Home Companion, Pictorial Review, and McCall's; and House Beautiful, Better Homes & Gardens and House & Garden from the 1890s-1930s (on HathiTrust and Internet Archive mostly; there are various websites that collect links to vintage magazines online) have deepend my understanding of the period so much. A lot of that is general information about the period, turns of phrase, discourse style, beauty and graphic design styles, and bits of trivia. But it's also filled in a huge gap that I didn't even really understand was there in my knowledge of the history of decorative arts and design.

I'm super excited about my new understanding of early 20th century romanticism right now. Which is highly related to and mostly the same thing as national romanticism, a trend stretching back to the 19th century; but also an aesthetic and stylistic background that was actually more commonplace, more widespread, than the influence of art deco and art nouveau and midcentury modernism in their respective periods, but is often overlooked when culture looks back. I knew the term "romanticism" in visual arts and design before, of course. In the 19th century it links up with the arts & crafts movement; in the 20s and 30s, my understanding was vaguer: cutesy florals and... folk art? I now know that yes, it was that, but it was so much more than that: it was historical nostalgia expressed in historical eclecticism, the dominant aesthetic being an expression of a cultural obsession with creating and glorifying a personalized, domesticated patriotic past.

It was still very much tied to the project of creating the nation-state, in this case mainly through oodles of mass-produced imitation antique furniture marketed as "early American" or "Tudor" or "Gothic" or "French provincial" or "Empire". (Genuine antiques and reproduction antiques were also popular or at least popularly admired, don't get me wrong; but a great deal of the mass-produced furniture in this period was more about an antique vibe than about any sort of realism - something that was also very much true of the earlier explosion of Victorian-era "revival" styles caused by the initial spread of industrialization and an earlier ballooning of the middle classes. Victorian-produced furniture and design styles are also very much historical eclecticism.) This continued into the midcentury, when the pastiche styles previously called "early American" and "Tudor" had evolved into what was then generally referred to as "Colonial" (they meant American colonial specifically), exemplified by the mid-century modest ranch house's frequent pine kitchen and fake wrought iron and hammered brass hardware. Midcentury American ranches are iconic today, but the national imagination is inclined to populate them with mid-mod and streamline modern in blocks of color and metal-trimmed laminates; but in the period, the pine kitchen and the gingham ruffle were actually far more popular, even at modernism's height.

I'm focusing on American history in this narrative because I'm reading American magazines, but this was happening all over Europe. National romanticism in the 19th century produced a flourishing interest in cultural history and folk art in Europe too, and the same historical-vibe furniture recalling pre-Industrial styles was mass-produced for a growing middle class across Europe in the early 20th century. In Finland and Sweden the style was dominated by Gustavian (early 19th century, neoclassical) and rococo and baroque styles, often simplified, but the Nordic countries were leaders in modernism from the 1930s onwards, which changed the picture somewhat. Dipping into museums and auction sites from Finland and the Scandis brings a strong wind of light woods and simplified forms, painted instead of dark-stained wood, and a healthy admixture of functionalist/Bauhaus styles. And also way more actual crystal and imitation crystal chandeliers. Finns and Swedes fucking love their crystal chandeliers. I can understand their cultural history and dark winters and all that before the invention of electric lighting, but they still need to pump the brakes a bit. Chandeliers do not belong in your kitchen or bathroom, guys.

Every now and then I get a craving like,

"I wish I could read [fandom] the way it was before [subsequent bad canon/creator behavior]."

The thing is, all the stuff I enjoyed the first time I read it is still there, but... it never feels the same. All that Avengers tower fic from 2012 and all that season 1 Teen Wolf fic, for example, actually don't taste the way I remember them tasting.

This is true of a number of foods that I liked as a kid, too. The smell of bacon or hamburger cooking are slightly nauseating to me now that I haven't eaten them in 20 years, but sometimes I still wake up from a dream wishing I could have the bacon cheeseburgers I ate at age 19 from the college dining hall once a week.

Like oud or something. Not patchouli anyway. Because after shampooing it three times the night before last, I could still smell that on it yesterday every time it got in my face (the physically irritating part of the smell did wash out, but I personally dislike musks and think they're gross even when they don't make me sneeze). I can still smell it today too, but my hair is dry, and I don't want to shampoo it again yet.

So I guess this is no longer directly related to allergies, but I don't have a haircare tag or an "I fucking hate perfume flames on the side of my face" tag.