I had a lot of spirited feedback to my Thanksgiving recipe for roasted peacock. Apparently you all can’t wait to run out and celebrate by cooking up a giant bird and serving it in its own feathers. Well, this is the week to do it!

Another fine Christmas tradition dating from the Regency era–and there aren’t all that many–is plum pudding, or Christmas pudding. Regency merrymakers didn’t have Christmas trees or elaborate gift-giving rituals; we can thank Queen Victoria and the German traditions of her husband Prince Albert for those legacies. But plum pudding is oh-so-English, and has been around for centuries. Want to make one? Here’s how.

First, start about a month before Christmas. Oops! Ok, you can have yours in January.

Collect:

Two clean pieces of muslin, each about a yard square
8 eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ginger
1 tablespoon nutmeg
12 oz. milk
juice of one lemon
1/2 cup brandy

A pound each of:
suet (this is the hardened fat that is usually put out in winter for woodpeckers to eat) (I KNOW)
dried plums
raisins
currants (true currants are very uncommon in the US, so look for Zante raisins instead)
sultanas (sort of like what we’d call golden raisins, so feel free to use those)
breadcrumbs
flour
sugar

Cut up your suet into little pieces, then cut in the flour and bread crumbs. Mix in your eggs, spices, and dried fruit, and add as much of the milk as you need to bind it all together.

Wet one of your muslin squares, rub it with flour on both sides, then dump the pudding mixture onto it. Tie up the ends of the cloth, hobo-knapsack-style, almost as tightly as you can (leave your pudding a little room to grow).

Using the tied ends of the cloth, hang the pudding from a dowel or long spoon over a kettle of boiling water. Essentially you will be steaming it. Keep it over the boiling water for five hours, replenishing the water if it ever starts to evaporate.

When you’re done boiling it, wrap the other muslin square around the whole delightful bundle, put it in a bowl or on a tray for neatness’s sake, and douse it all with brandy. Then put it in a storage room or pantry where it will be undisturbed, and check on it every few days. If it ever seems dry, pour some more brandy on it.

What you’ll wind up with at the end of the month will look something like potting soil. I know this because I was once given a Christmas pudding as a gift by an ex-boyfriend.*  I suppose if you eat some–which I now regret to say I did not–you will become so full of joie de vivre and eau de vie that you will thoroughly enjoy every bite.

This recipe makes about 9 pounds, so invite your friends! N.B. I have not tested this recipe, or any other recipe involving suet.

For extra fun, you can stir some trinkets into the pudding. This is a Victorian tradition rather than Regency, but it’s all in good fun. The person who gets a trinket has a particular “fortune” for the coming year–or life, if they re extra-lucky.

Thimble=spinsterhood
Button=bachelorhood
Ring=marriage
Coin=good fortune
Boot=travel
Wishbone=a wish will be granted

One caveat when hunting down trinkets: be sure you don’t use any copper or brass items, because they’ll give you some nasty food. Stick to silver. (I would say, “or plastic,” but I have no idea how that would hold up to 5 hours of boiling.)

*He is not an ex because of the Christmas pudding, I should add.

Well, they used candles then.

That’s about all I knew about Regency-era lighting several years ago, before I cannonballed into the waters of romance-writing.  Now I know: yep, they used candles then. And lamps, too. And even gaslight. No fooling.

Lighting is a tricky business in historicals. Writers have to keep in mind the effects of waning light on the way things would look, or the mood that would be cast.  We have to keep in mind the side effects of that lighting, too:  candles are hot, and they drip and smoke.  Lamp oil often has a smell, and the Argand lamps used at the time cast a large shadow.  Quite simply, when the daylight went away, everything was different.

To people two hundred years ago, of course, it was normal to have fire hazards all over the place. To spend the evening hours with no light but flames, and the constant thickness of burning lamp oil. And so there’s no need to give special consideration to the lighting in descriptions, unless it’s something a character would notice.  But but but, I had to understand the lighting to know if it was something a character WOULD notice.

For example:  if a room is lit by candles, a hero can’t be waxing (ha) poetic about the color of the heroine’s eyes, unless he already knows it.  Candelight just isn’t bright enough to discern eye color, unless it comes from a chandelier.  And if you have a whole chandelier of candles, then you get heat, in a non-sexy sense.  If the candles are tallow, they’ll smell like a greasy spoon diner when they burn.  If they’re beeswax, they will have a very light and somewhat sweet scent, but those are so expensive that only the wealthy will use them, and only for special occasions like a ball.

These are the details that can help a setting come alive for a writer.  And if it comes alive for a writer, then there’s a better chance it will come alive for a reader.

I’m using a lamp as a plot point in my current WIP.  My hero is a…well, my agent referred to him as a “mad scientist,” and that’s pretty apt.  He’s a nobleman who tinkers.  And one of the things he tinkers with is a new kind of lamp.  As I mentioned, the Argand lamps cast shadows, because the oil was gravity-fed from above the burner.  Behold:

Carcel lamps were newer.  They were complicated and hard to maintain, because they ran by clockwork.  Their light was better than Argands since they didn’t cast a shadow, but the trade-off wasn’t worth it to most people because of the hassles of the Carcel’s expense and maintenance.  In other words:  Carcel lamps were gadgets.  They were the Kinects of their day, only even gadget-ier.  Something a mad scientist could never resist tinkering with, even if the situation was completely inappropriate for tinkering.

The fuel for these lamps is its own interesting story.  Petroleum refinement didn’t begin until later in the nineteenth century, so there was no kerosene for Regency lamps.  And though a few posh public streets were gaslit, there was no gas lighting for homes.  When people lighted a lamp, they were burning oil.  Not lamp oil as we know it–which is colorless and odorless–but usually either a vegetable-based oil called colza oil (which looks a lot like modern-day canola and doesn’t have too much of a smell) or whale oil, or less often, fish oils.

You can get whale oil by boiling down blubber, which really makes it more of a melted wax than a true oil.  (Not that this mattered to the whales.)  Some whale or fish oils could have a very strong smell, depending on the type of animal from which they were made.  The best kind of animal oil for lighting was spermaceti, which, when treated, was nearly clear and odorless.  This oil comes from a giant reservoir in the head of a sperm whale.  No one knows why, but a whale can have up to three tons of this waxy whitish substance in its head.  The oil–and the whale–are so called because, well, guess what whalers thought the oil looked like?  Yeah.

I’m very glad I can flip on a light switch.  How about you?

Folks, make room on your Thanksgiving tables for some delicious birds cooked Regency-style. They didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving themselves — that’s an American holiday — but swan or peacock was always appropriate for Christmas. So you can just hold onto this recipe for another month if you want to be more authentic.

I’m paraphrasing the recipe to leave out more gruesome details, but I think you’ll get the gist. Hope you have a working fireplace and spit!

Kill the peacock, then skin it gently with the skin and feathers intact. (Don’t forget to leave the head on to prove the bird is fresh!)
Clean the bird, then stuff it with herbs and spices. Thyme, rosemary, and cloves are good.
Roast it on a spit, basting with water and butter.
Then take it off the spit and put its skin back on like a jacket. Beautiful! If you really want a splendid effect, you can wire the peacock’s legs so it will seem to stand up on its platter.

If you’re not into cooking zoo animals, here’s a turkey recipe from The Jane Austen Cookbook. You’ll need that fireplace and spit again:

“When you roast a goose, turkey, or fowls of any sort, take care to singe them with a piece of white paper, and baste them with butter; dredge them with a little flour, and sprinkle a little salt on; and when the smoak begins to draw to the fire, and they look plump, baste them again, and dredge them with a little flour, and take them up.”

Bon appétit!

The word “ethics” generally either makes people fall into a stupor, or it makes them perk up like puppies smelling a brisket. I’m more of the puppy type, because I am interested in stories about complicated, unsolvable situations. I don’t get often get more engaged than “ooh, story,” because the usual ethical scenario is hypothetical. It’s missing the human element that grabs me on a deeper level.

I bring this up because I just read a fantastic book about research ethics that is all about the human element: the why, how, and what if of medical research. (I know this has nothing to do with romance, but dang it, it’s a good book. And click over to my bio and remind yourself: I do have a secret identity as a health researcher, so I like this.)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, recounts the story of a young African-American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951. She lived an ordinary life, but her legacy is extraordinary: a tissue sample of her cancer cells, taken without her knowledge (as was standard at the time), was the first human tissue sample ever to survive and grow in culture. To Henrietta Lacks, we owe the polio vaccine, as well as thousands of drugs and medical patents.

Her family knew nothing of this for decades. As their long-gone mother’s cells enriched companies and saved lives around the world, they lived in poverty and often went without health insurance. When they learned the truth about her legacy, all were shocked. Some were angry; some were proud. It was a unique process of grief, to know that their mother had been taken and altered to help others, even though she’d left them behind.

Now that’s a grabber of a human element. Rebecca Skloot tells this story so well; the story not only of Henrietta Lacks, but of Skloot’s own struggle to gain the trust of a family that had often felt betrayed. It’s not a tome about ethics. It doesn’t preach. But it will make you think, and wonder why; how; what if.

Everyone knows men don’t read romance.  Or do they?

If you’re writing a Regency romance, you can’t refer to a character’s idea as half-baked. You can, however, call your characters idiots.

Why is this? Because, according to etymonline.com, use of the phrase “half-baked” to mean something silly or foolish dates only to 1855 — that is, well into the Victorian era. “Idiot,” however, dates all the way back to the Middle Ages. Use it with impunity.

Language is an important part of historical accuracy — for which, it probably goes without saying, most authors of historical romance certainly strive (though probably never completely achieve). At its most basic level, we don’t want our dukes bumbling around saying “fo shizzle” unless they are experiencing a fit of madness. But on a more subtle level, we want characters’ language and thoughts to reflect those of the time in which they lived. Nowadays, if we’re bold and a little rude, we might call people egocentric [1900], half-assed [1932], or sexy [1905]. These aren’t as glaring as “fo shizzle” or even the uber-American “okay” [1839]. But if your story’s set in the Regency, you have to find a different word for the concept.

How do you do that? Well, you can always consult the etymology of a word in the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s only 20 huge volumes!! One mere bookcase!!*

For those quick must-avoid-being-half-assed lookups, might I point you instead to www.etymonline.com? This is the brainchild of lexicographic genius Douglas Harper, who has distilled the greatest hits of the OED and many other linguistic sources into a wonderful online database of common words and their origins. It’s free, it’s easy to use, it’s well researched, and it’s just all around good. Hooray! [est. 1680s]

*I’m razzing the OED for its ginormousness [1948], but it is probably the most staggeringly complete resource in existence for linguists, writers, and lovers of language. Get thee to a library sometime and check it out — or, if you’re really lucky, your library might offer online access from home. You can also buy yourself a subscription if you are extremely gung-ho [1942].

Moving along in our periodic series, wherein I describe nuggets of research gold. Today, let us talk about food.  (And please forgive the Spider-Man pun.)

I must be a mean person, because in my books, I keep wanting my characters to eat food that sounds repulsive to us today (and even sometimes to people of the 1810s).  But it also needs to be food that existed at the time.  You can’t have, you know, your characters eating a Fudgesicle.

The Jane Austen Cookbook is a wonderful print source for Regency-apropriate recipes, giving many table and stillroom (that is, home remedy) recipes that were hand-copied by a friend/relative of the great Jane.  Since we don’t often cook with isinglass these days, for example, the recipes are updated for modern cookery methods (you get to use powdered gelatin instead of isinglass — whew).

This source is especially wonderful because it’s period -appropriate – that is, there are no Victorian inventions, innovations, and influences.  Sometimes you run into that in social histories of the nineteenth century — which, uh, covers a lot of territory.  JAC is all Regency and earlier, so you can feed your characters a curry (yes!) and know it’s ok for the time.

This book is out of print, but it’s pretty easy to find inexpensive used copies.