Paksworld

Yesterday, in preparation for going over to the ranch to bring home some of the frozen meat from Big Bull,  we needed to reduce the bulk of the un-cut bones of Big Bull that came home with us initially.    I make soup out of beef bones (good soup) and then the well-cooked-out bones are stuck in the garden soil to decompose.

Cutting up frozen large bones (this was a very large bull) without a big meat saw (which is over at the ranch and isn’t easily transportable) is a strenuous and messy procedure,  carried out in the back yard with a sycamore stump and an axe.   Richard pursued it with moderate enthusiasm and great skill, packaging the bones in plastic freezer bags.   There’s still a lot of soup bone in the freezer.  Probably, um, forty or fifty soups’ worth of soup bone.  Goina be a lot of beef stock in the freezer soon…

The cooks in the Duke’s Company (or any mercenary company or any household where slaughter took place) would have been familiar with the sight and sound of an axe hitting large nonhuman bones.    The butchers’ quarter in a city…the yard of a manor house…the barton of a village farm…all would resound to the sound from time to time.   And household small critters would be coming to pick up scraps.

This isn’t the first time Richard’s cut up something with an axe for me–Nameless Heifer was the first.    Big Bull’s leg bones are a lot (!!!) bigger.

Bread and soup are, to me, very elemental foods, and when I’m baking or making soup, I feel a deep connection to all the cooks who went before–women, many of them.   On a day like today, when a norther has blown in, I often start a soup.    I’m not today, because this is Tuesday before Thanksgiving and I don’t need to cover the stovetop with one of my big soup pots.    But come Friday…yeah.

There’s a cook in the new books, who was at first merely a tiny part, slightly comic.    But she’s showing up more–with more sides to her character.  I’m trying to keep her “in her place”  because there’s enough going on already, but…she’s a hard one control.

Our neighbor, who has permission to hunt on our land, took a deer last week.   Another one of those real life events that can translate into fiction very well.

And the gathering of friends for Thanksgiving–the whole sharing-the-feast experience–and the bit of fencing (pointy-steel kind) that we may do if weather permits–and the bit of crossbow practice that might take place, ditto–are all part of filling the well from which the stories flow.

The rest of this week will be consumed by cleaning, cooking, sharing time with friends, and then cleaning up the aftermath and cooking the bones.