Guest Post: The Best Halloween Ever by Wendy Wagner

A bit of a preamble. I often say things which are completely true, only to be confronted by people who flat out claim that I’m only making it up. That I *must* be making it up. There’s no way the very true thing I just said is true.

I’ve learned to cite my sources. So, before we begin, a word about the color purple. Not the movie, although it was good. Very good. Alice Walker’s novel won the Pulitzer in 1983, and went on to become both a hit musical, and the film starring Whoopi Goldberg in her debut as an actress. It might have been something far less in the hands of a director other than Steven Spielberg. But no, not here to discuss film. Here to discuss food, so:

Anthocyanins! Water-soluble, vacuolar, pH-sensitive pigments! Part of a parent class of molecules known as ‘flavonoids’. Mostly 3-glucosides of the anthocyanidins… The important bit is that under the right conditions, they make plants PURPLE.

All plants have some anthocyanins in them; in the stems, the leaves, the fruit, or the flowers. So, finding a natural variety of say, wheat, with a particularly high anthocyanin content in the grain is, in fact, entirely expected. This is what we find: Ethiopian Blue-Tinged Emmer. It is a cultivar selected in (obviously) Ethiopia by Dan Jason of Salt Spring Seeds, who brought back two blue-tinged seeds from a trip to Ethiopia in 1993.

“Purple grain colour is caused by anthocyanins in the pericarp whereas blue colour is caused by anthocyanins in the aleurone layer. Purple grains occur in tetraploid wheats from Ethiopia, and in one bread wheat accession apparently native to China.” –Zeven, A.C. Euphytica (1991) 56: 243. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00042371

Tetraploid wheat. Not diploid like commercial wheat. Wouldn’t it be fun to cross a tetraploid wheat with rye? You’d get tetraploid triticale. And if you used an anthocyanin wheat, you’d have Anthocyanin Quadrotriticale! Super-hardy, purple, grows-almost-anywhere wheat, and the Klingon Empire would kill to get this stuff. And Guinan would advise Picard to keep it away from the Ferengi. Hey, there’s Whoopi Goldberg again!

But, I’m supposed to be cooking, aren’t I? I’m getting to it, really I am.

Hagos Hailu Kassegn has done a full determination and analysis of the proximate bioactive compounds in anthocyanin wheat. Total anthocyanin content (TAC) in anthocyanin-colored purple wheat was found to have a mean value of 197.4 mg/100 g. — Hagos Hailu Kassegn & Fatih Yildiz (2018) Determination of proximate composition and bioactive compounds of the Abyssinian purple wheat, Cogent Food & Agriculture, 4:1, DOI: 10.1080/23311932.2017.1421415

Purple wheat is a very real thing. Its Abyssinian origins have been known for over 100 years.

It only stands to reason, therefore, that there must be purple wheat products. I don’t have to invent imaginary purple wheat noodles. There are real purple wheat noodles out there. Let’s go find some.”¨”¨Hans Lienesch, runs a blog called “The Ramen Rater” from his home in Edmonds, WA. Not too long ago, he rated Purple Wheat Noodles from Koka in Singapore.

https://www.theramenrater.com/2014/01/11/1282-koka-purple-wheat-noodles-aglio-olio-flavor/

Ta-da! There they are. A purple wheat product. Made slightly MORE purple by the addition of some blue corn.

What are we going to do with these purple wheat noodles? We’re not making ramen, that’s certain. Anthocyanins are water soluble, didn’t I say so? They’ll turn the broth purple. Totally not fun. Indeed the package of Agilo-olio flavor Purple Wheat noodles is labeled “Dry Noodles.” Not technically ramen, but intended for stir-fry dishes.
So”¦

Where to find purple wheat noodles? It just so happens that I spent the first six months of 2018 across from the coolest multi-ethnic supermarket in the known universe: Saars. It’s kinda like H-Mart only more or less regional to the Seattle area (sorry, entire rest of the planet). Imagine that the very best Asian market and the finest Mexican market fell madly in love with each other (apparently this story is best told by Chuck Tingle), and eloped to Las Vegas for an impromptu wedding complete with Elvis impersonator. Saars is their love-child.”¨So here we are in my kitchen with a FIVE-PACK of Koka Purple Wheat Noodles, some onion, bell peppers, and thin slices of beef.

This next bit is really simple. Prepare the noodles to package directions and set aside. Sauté the beef and set aside. Slice the onions, and peppers and sauté. Reintroduce the beef to the pan, add in the noodles, and plate in shallow bowls. Yes, I know. This is nearly 800 words just for a single paragraph of not really recipe.

Top with mixed crushed nuts, fried onions, and sesame-seed furikake. This is a delightful meal and multi-colored to boot. Whether or not anthocyanin actually have any real dietary impact is an exercise best left to a nutritionist.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

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Unlike the more familiar Greco-Roman or Norse pantheons which feature vivid characters and well-defined myth cycles, the Inuit myths tend to ramble, skipping madly about with the rapid scene changes of a disjointed dream and likely to end abruptly with a stoic, “˜”Here ends this story.”

The mythology is peppered with impressive spirits with interesting names. But aside from a name and a job description there’s little else to go on. So when I decided to write ALAANA’S WAY, an epic fantasy series about the first female shaman in an arctic world based on Inuit myth, I had my hands full. As shaman it’s Alaana’s duty to negotiate with the great spirits, and they all became colorful characters in the story. Their appearance and personalities were entirely up to me.

Another problem. A nomadic lifestyle, the vagaries of a mostly oral tradition and a fractured tribal system leave little agreement between different versions of the same story. Even the most established figure, Sedna, Mistress of the Sea, owns multiple conflicting origin stories. One version claims she was the daughter of two giants with such an uncontrollable urge for flesh that she tried to devour her parents in their sleep. Another tribe insists she was a young beauty forced to marry an elderly neighbor who turned out to be a monstrous carrion bird, leaving her no route of escape except a plunge into the salty depths. Or perhaps she was a poor orphan girl mistreated and cast into the sea by the other children; her fingers, chopped off as she clung desperately to the side of the kayak, fell into the water to become the walruses and seal. I had to tread carefully here. I decided, in a flash of Solomon-like insight, that all of them were true. I supposed that in the Beforetime, where dreams were reality, she was all those things, lived all those lives. But here and now she is simply Sedna, the Sea Mother who controls all the animals in the ocean.

Another established figure is Tulukkaruq, the Raven, who always represents a mischievous spirit in Native American folklore. The Inuit Raven is impressive indeed, having been credited with creating human beings and bestowng the gift of fire on us as well. But really, this one was easy. I gave him the personality of the Dark Knight’s Joker and urged him to plague both my shamanic heroine and her villainous nemesis in equal measure.

But what about the rest? Interpreting an entire pantheon is a daunting task, but I never flinched. I’m a fantasist. This is what I live for.

Consider Tornarssuk the guardian spirit of the polar bears. The name spoke to me. I pictured an enormous shimmering white bear with starry eyes. He would be fierce and deadly but also benevolent and wise, with a soft spot for human beings as well. Tekkeitsertok is the guardian of the caribou, so a tawny-furred man with cloven hooves and an impressive rack of antlers. I figured he was an old and docile spirit, more interested in sleeping than fighting, but he does get into at least one good brawl before the series’ end. The Whale-Man may appear as a gigantic black bowhead or a Poseidon-like man, and let’s make him the estranged lover of Sedna for good measure. I wrote a scene in book four where the two have a torrential undersea battle, her sharks on one side vs his whales on the other.

What about Erlaveersinioq, the Skeleton Who Walks, a terrifying spirit who loves murder and death above all things? I guess we can chalk him up in the villain’s column. Sila, spirit of the Wild Wind, was a wild card but in the southern tribes he is also the spirit of justice. Let’s put him with the heroes, but leave some question as to whether he’ll really show up to help. As for the snowy owl who leads the souls of the dead across the great divide, she should be petite and cute, with a light as bright as sunlight on fresh snow. Narssuk, who controls the weather, is an insane sky baby who lets down his caribou skin diaper to issue a stormy blast of thunder and snow.

Somewhere along the line I found mention of the Tunrit, a race of people who lived in the arctic before the Raven created human beings. A race of prehistoric supermen. I could find nothing more about them except for the name of the tribe, but that was enough. I had found my villain. A promethean figure among the first men, who had wrestled sabre-toothed tigers and brought the sun from the other side of the sky, and who turned to sorcery to atone for that terrible mistake.

So are my versions of these mythological figures accurate? Probably not, since they came mostly out of my own imagination. But they might be. And that’s an important point. In dealing with a cultural belief system, albeit an archaic and disfavored one, I felt a duty to be respectful. My books sit proudly on the shelves of the Toronto Public Library and in a home for wayward Inuit boys in Nunavut, Alaska. In correspondence I’ve received from Inuit people reaction varies from praise for giving these mythological figures new life, to a stoic acknowledgement of the fact that at least I didn’t contradict anything.

That last is not entirely true. A pivotal figure in the series is the Moon-Man. Many Inuit tribes posit the familiar Native American myth that the lecherous Moon-Man chases his sister the Sun across the sky each day in hopes of an incestuous liaison. This didn’t fit in with my elderly, romantic Moon-Man nor my version of the Sun as an extraterrestrial spirit. What to do? I decided to have my shamanic heroine Alaana ask the Moon-Man, on one her soul-flights to his realm, if the story was true. “Oh no,” he says, “that’s just a story people tell.” So at least the contradiction comes right out of the mouth of the Moon-Man himself. Who could argue with that?

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Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.