Verity Player’s Fiendish Bean-Dish

“Oh, brilliant! What shall we bring?”

Verity and her husband Sacha””and any of their family friends””will never have a host cook all alone.

This is the dish they brought round to the Meiers’ for the first “˜do’ at theirs of that fateful new year: the year when she would twice travel to the USA””the “˜Evening Lands’. There she would risk her life for a simple letter written, as it turned out, during the head-splitting hangover after this particular soirée…

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Arash and Farrukh had arrived in Britain, the day after New Year’s, without anywhere to stay. Within three days, they’d launched themselves into buying a house together.

Ruth said it might be fun for them all to meet up.

By nine in the evening noisy conversation criss-crossed the Meiers’ generous dining table. Dishes of gefiltefish, couscous salad and stuffed vine leaves passed from hand to hand, along with news and wine.

Verity sat next to the two new arrivals.

She picked up an open bottle of red to refill her glass, offering it to her neighbours first.

Each declined with a polite wave of the hand.

“Er”¦white, then?”

Neither said anything.

“Oh, right. Sorry. Of course.”

Sharia law.

Two blokes living together.

Sometimes people made even less sense than usual.

She poured herself a glass and took a swig.

“Ruth said you were house-hunting.”

She’d start with the easy question.

“Where’re you going to buy?”

“Bishopthorpe Road.”

“What, near the racecourse?”

Farrukh nodded.

“Would you go to the Races? Are you allowed to bet?”

“Gambling is haram. But for horses, one can make an arrangement with the organisers”””˜make a prediction’ and win, if one is correct. There are bureaux for this, in our country. We’ve not yet found a Predictions Bureau here, though.”

Arash smiled. “There’s a business opportunity for someone.”

He paused.

“My cousin would have been good at that.”

“Would have?” She picked up her glass. “Does he”¦do something else now?”

No! Her face burned””Heck, it must match the colour of the wine in her glass. Would have. That must mean he was dead, been killed somewhere.

“He disappeared.”

The whole table went quiet.

Everyone turned to her. Was she supposed to ask?

“Er”¦how?”

“He was arrested. In Rawalpindi, the night before he was due to fly to Europe. Terrorism. No one has heard from him since.”

“What’s”¦what’s his name?”

Perhaps Amnesty had taken up his case? Perhaps she’d see him in next month’s magazine when it arrived at the house. She should make sure to find it, and write. She’d already made that New Year’s resolution to write to the Director of the C.I.A. about those camps”¦

The formal name, elaborate and winding, soon left her consciousness. She didn’t dare ask, “˜what was that again?’

Ruth rescued her. “So, about the house?”

Arash explained the very thing she’d wanted to know to start with””how a Sharia mortgage worked. A mortgage without usury.

She hoped she hadn’t drunk too much to be able to remember the details in the morning.

***

Verity pressed the hot flannel against her forehead. If she pressed hard enough, perhaps the splinters of ice might melt””not dig into the joints in her skull. She tried not to groan. Sacha stirred. Damn, she’d not wanted to wake him.

“I made an idiot of myself at the Meiers’, love. Sorry”¦”

“I did tell you. I did pour some water out for you.”

“Sorry”¦”

“And you asked so many questions. I hope we haven’t upset the Meiers.”

He turned over, away from her, but the pain put her past the point of caring.

She had to write that letter in the morning.

It needn’t be a long one…

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But to more practical matters. The dish, being Vegan, is (or at least, can be considered) also both kosher and halal. And you never know when that might come in useful.

 

The vegetables: 

• 2 small potatoes
• 3 carrots
• 2 parsnips
• Half a celeriac, or 4 sticks celery

The rest: 

• 4 tablespoons sunflower oil
• 5 cloves garlic
• About 1/2 cubic inch ginger
• 2 red onions
• Fistful of fresh mint leaves
• 1 level teaspoon crushed chillies (turmeric will also work, if people prefer a milder dish)
• 1 tin (about 400g) tomatoes
• 1 tin (about 250g once drained) cooked chick-peas or any white beans such as cannellini, pinto…
• 1 mug (about 300g) of veggie stock
• Pinch saffron threads

Kit: 

• Large frying pan
• Cooking spoons
• Deep dish or similar, to set vegetables aside in
• Only one cooking ring needed
• About 50 minutes of time, of which 20 are actually busy

Method: 

1. Dice the vegetables.
2. Finely chop the onion, garlic and ginger (no need to peel the ginger).
3. Finely chop the fresh mint.
4. Make up the stock and drop the saffron threads in.
5. Tip half the sunflower oil into the frying pan and gently fry the vegetables until they begin to soften. If the frying pan has a lid that’s great, but still make sure the veggies don’t stick to the bottom. I don’t know why but the potatoes are always the worst for this.
6. Take the fried veggies out and set them aside.
7. Top up the oil in the pan, and heat gently.
8. Fry the garlic and ginger.
9. Add the onions, mint and chilli, and fry on low heat until the onions are soft and translucent.
10. Tip in the tin of tomatoes, stir them in, and simmer for 5 minutes.
11. Add the drained beans, stir in, then add the fried veggies and the stock.
12. Simmer for at least half an hour.

Seasonal variations: 

Fiendish bean-dish can be adapted for summer by changing to summer vegetables. Celery rather than celeriac, and red peppers instead of parsnips, for example. It can even be served cold, if the weather merits it.

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BIO: C L Spillard is a complex interplay of matter and energy in a wave-pattern whose probability cloud is densest in York, United Kingdom.

The moon landings influenced the young pattern’s self-awareness mechanisms, igniting lifelong interest in Physics, and in humanity’s plight on Earth.

C L Spillard’s wave-pattern enjoys proximity to a second pattern originating in St Petersburg (Russia), and these two have since generated two younger ones who are now diffusing over the planet stuffing themselves with knowledge as if it were going out of fashion.

She claims responsibility for a raft of published short stories, the fantasy “˜The Price of Time’, and its newly-released sequel “˜The Evening Lands’.

Her website lurks at www.cspillardwriter.co.uk and she can be stalked on Twitter @candispillard.

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Imagine a Hellmouth. No, not the one in Sunnydale, California””a medieval Hellmouth, straight out of a manuscript illumination. Pointy teeth, flames, unhappy people.
When I decided that I wanted to write a book about a medieval woman who leads a raid on Hell, that was the sort of underworld that immediately came to my mind. A mouth, though, implies a throat, and a stomach, and, well, everything else.

So I had a Hellbeast on my hands, a creature that spends centuries underground, but occasionally makes an appearance on the surface. It’s a little like a platypus, but without the bill. And a lot bigger.

Within the Hellbeast, there are revenants. But there are also humans””some have been altered in various ways, and some are extremely long-lived, but they are humans nonetheless. This led me to an unusual world-building question: What do people eat in the underworld?

That is a trick question, of course. Should you find yourself in any sort of underworld, and/or in Faerie, it’s best not to eat anything at all. The old stories are quite clear on that point. Probably the most famous example is that of Persephone, who is obliged to spend part of every year in the underworld because she ate a pomegranate seed there.

Food is a medium of communication between the world below and the world above. To be in a world””to see it, to speak to its inhabitants””is to be of that world. The food of the underworld is part of the underworld, and makes the eater part of the underworld too.

Conversely, food allows the dead to become, temporarily at least, part of the world above once more. When Odysseus wants to speak to the dead, he pours a libation of milk, honey, wine and water, and sprinkles barley meal over the whole mess, praying to Persephone, among others. What really draws the dead to him, though, is sheep’s blood that he lets run into a pit. The seer Teresias will only speak to him after drinking the blood.

Red wine and honey were also in the jars sent along to the afterlife with King Tutankhamun in Egypt, who could also choose from a variety of mummified meats slathered in tree resin.

In an underworld, food isn’t just about communication, status and sustenance. It’s often about torment. Hel, the ruler of the Norse underworld, has a plate called Hunger and a knife called Famine. Tantalus stole nectar and ambrosia, and murdered his own son to feed him to the gods. His punishment is to stand in water, with a fruit-laden branch over his head, just barely unable to drink or eat.

In Dante’s Inferno, a nobleman named Ugolino (who may have eaten his children’s bodies in the final throes of his own starvation) is frozen in a pit next to the man who betrayed him, forever gnawing on his enemy’s head. He is both tormentor and the tormented.

Hell was one of several medieval examples of a “topsy-turvy world”, writes Herman Pleij in Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life. If you ate too much, or committed some other food-related sin such as cannibalism, your punishment in the world below would be to become food yourself, to be denied food, or to be forced to eat unclean or disgusting food. Gluttons would be punished by being made “to suffer such terrible hunger and thirst that they eventually beg for hay, dregs of wine, and finally excrement and urine” before being served the meat of toads or even dragons.

Sometimes, the residents of Hell punish themselves. In the allegory of the long spoons, the residents of Hell are unable to get the food to their mouths because their spoons are too long; in heaven, the same spoons cause no difficulty, as people there are kind enough to feed each other.

I had some ideas, then, for what sort of food would be right in my medieval European Hellbeast. Something that would be of the underworld, not just in it. Something red, to recall pomegranates and wine. Something that would be a little horrifying to the world above. Something that recalls the sacrifice Odysseus made, when he needed to bridge the world of the living and the dead. And for practical reasons, something that would be available in those long centuries when the Beast is dormant under the earth.

I’m sorry to say that what I came up with is the blood of the Beast itself. The denizens of Hell drink it, and they eat it, in the form of glittering balls that look a little like caviar, or like pomegranate seeds.

This is not a meal I can endorse, as a vegetarian. As a substitute, might I suggest some pomegranate tapioca?

BIO: Kate Heartfield’s debut novel Armed in Her Fashion (CZP) is available as an ebook as of April 24, and as a paperback as of May 17. Her interactive novel The Road to Canterbury is now available from Choice of Games. Tor.com Publications will publish two time-travel novellas by Kate, beginning with Alice Payne Arrives in late 2018. Her fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Strange Horizons, Lackington’s, and Monstrous Little Voices: New Tales from Shakespeare’s Fantasy World. Kate is a former newspaper editor and lives in Ottawa, Canada.

Website: https://heartfieldfiction.com/
About Armed in Her Fashion: https://chizinepub.com/armed-in-her-fashion/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35497377-armed-in-her-fashion
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kateheartfield

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If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines.