I Can Do It!
2 April 2025 11:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI was smitten by a sudden active desire to attempt the Soviet Twenty Years After sequel during a spare half-hour, and found to my great relief that I can actually understand it -- I can't make out all the dialogue, and certainly not the song lyrics, but I can understand what is going on in every scene, and in fact rather more clearly than I could in the case of my first hearing of the fourth sequel :-)
Possibly because there hasn't been quite so much uncanonical activity in between, and there are fewer characters to deal with -- but I frankly can't remember what canonically happens at the start of Dumas "Twenty Years After", save that I'm pretty sure it doesn't involve d'Artagnan getting into a tavern brawl after overhearing talk of someone wanting to kill "d'Herblay" (upon which he conveniently ejaculates "Aramis!" for the benefit of the audience, since that name was not mentioned anywhere in the original film ;-)
Cardinal Mazarin is played for broad comedy, which is a bit tedious, but I was used to that from his appearance as a ghost in the fourth film. It's hard to understand why the Queen would tolerate him in her chambers, however, let alone in her bed (where his vocal jealousy of the dead Buckingham is the only thing that can cause her patience to snap: "I loved him, but I was not his lover!") D'Artagnan, on the other hand, treats the Cardinal with as much deference as if he had been Richelieu, presumably honouring the office and not the man -- even when he finds Mazarin masquerading in a musketeer's outfit, apparently in the hopes of passing through the streets of Paris without being recognised by a populace who hate him.
At any rate d'Artagnan agrees to set out in search of the three friends with whom he long ago lost contact, as he is commanded to do by Mazarin insisting that he is speaking in the Queen's name (the argument Mazarin uses on Queen Anne is that since he himself has no friends to help him then he must needs resort to hers ;-p) D'Artagnan (now battered and middle-aged) does, however, manage to point out to the Cardinal that this task is likely to prove difficult and involve a lot of travelling, and to squeeze a sack of money out of his reluctant master for expenses ;-)
Swede and Apple Bake
This was a recipe from a very old and yellowing clipping in the family scrapbook which lists various different things you can do with swedes; I had a very sad specimen (we are now in the 'hungry gap' when the winter root vegetables are barely worth having any longer) and decided to use it up.
You simply mash together a cooked swede with a couple of cooking apples added in the last few minutes of boiling the root -- I put in a scrap of celeriac and some cabbage-stalk as well that were hanging around in the fridge. You mash up the whole lot with 3 tablespoons of butter, salt, pepper and nutmeg, top it with 'buttered breadcrumbs' (I melted some more butter and rolled them in it) and bake it in a moderate oven for half an hour or so. I added a single rasher of streaky bacon over the top as well which got crisped in the oven, and it was actually very tasty. The sourness of the unsweetened cooking apple gives the whole dish an almost lemony flavour, and the breadcrumbs add bulk and texture, while all the butter adds richness.
Brown Bread Mist
A fairly extravagant recipe from "120 Ways of Using Bread" ("a delightful sweet... light yet sustaining") which I tried out because I had, as it happened, both some stale bread and some cut-price whipping cream (date-expiring): it is basically a simpler form of Eton Mess. You pile stale or toasted breadcrumbs into a glass dish (so that the layers are visible), top them with a thin layer of strawberry jam, then a layer of whipped cream, then another layer of each. Then you grate chocolate over the top layer of cream and serve ;-)
My home-made strawberry jam was extremely lumpy, so the result was basically equivalent to eating jam by the spoonful with whipped cream and added crunch -- very tasty, though I wouldn't have described it as 'light'!
Possibly because there hasn't been quite so much uncanonical activity in between, and there are fewer characters to deal with -- but I frankly can't remember what canonically happens at the start of Dumas "Twenty Years After", save that I'm pretty sure it doesn't involve d'Artagnan getting into a tavern brawl after overhearing talk of someone wanting to kill "d'Herblay" (upon which he conveniently ejaculates "Aramis!" for the benefit of the audience, since that name was not mentioned anywhere in the original film ;-)
Cardinal Mazarin is played for broad comedy, which is a bit tedious, but I was used to that from his appearance as a ghost in the fourth film. It's hard to understand why the Queen would tolerate him in her chambers, however, let alone in her bed (where his vocal jealousy of the dead Buckingham is the only thing that can cause her patience to snap: "I loved him, but I was not his lover!") D'Artagnan, on the other hand, treats the Cardinal with as much deference as if he had been Richelieu, presumably honouring the office and not the man -- even when he finds Mazarin masquerading in a musketeer's outfit, apparently in the hopes of passing through the streets of Paris without being recognised by a populace who hate him.
At any rate d'Artagnan agrees to set out in search of the three friends with whom he long ago lost contact, as he is commanded to do by Mazarin insisting that he is speaking in the Queen's name (the argument Mazarin uses on Queen Anne is that since he himself has no friends to help him then he must needs resort to hers ;-p) D'Artagnan (now battered and middle-aged) does, however, manage to point out to the Cardinal that this task is likely to prove difficult and involve a lot of travelling, and to squeeze a sack of money out of his reluctant master for expenses ;-)
Swede and Apple Bake
This was a recipe from a very old and yellowing clipping in the family scrapbook which lists various different things you can do with swedes; I had a very sad specimen (we are now in the 'hungry gap' when the winter root vegetables are barely worth having any longer) and decided to use it up.
You simply mash together a cooked swede with a couple of cooking apples added in the last few minutes of boiling the root -- I put in a scrap of celeriac and some cabbage-stalk as well that were hanging around in the fridge. You mash up the whole lot with 3 tablespoons of butter, salt, pepper and nutmeg, top it with 'buttered breadcrumbs' (I melted some more butter and rolled them in it) and bake it in a moderate oven for half an hour or so. I added a single rasher of streaky bacon over the top as well which got crisped in the oven, and it was actually very tasty. The sourness of the unsweetened cooking apple gives the whole dish an almost lemony flavour, and the breadcrumbs add bulk and texture, while all the butter adds richness.
Brown Bread Mist
A fairly extravagant recipe from "120 Ways of Using Bread" ("a delightful sweet... light yet sustaining") which I tried out because I had, as it happened, both some stale bread and some cut-price whipping cream (date-expiring): it is basically a simpler form of Eton Mess. You pile stale or toasted breadcrumbs into a glass dish (so that the layers are visible), top them with a thin layer of strawberry jam, then a layer of whipped cream, then another layer of each. Then you grate chocolate over the top layer of cream and serve ;-)
My home-made strawberry jam was extremely lumpy, so the result was basically equivalent to eating jam by the spoonful with whipped cream and added crunch -- very tasty, though I wouldn't have described it as 'light'!