Guest Post: Author M.J. Rose talks about fragrances

M.J. Rose:  I've been fascinated with lost fragrances since long before I started writing The Book of Lost Fragrances... since I found a bottle of perfume on my great grandmother's dresser that had belonged to her mother in Russia. Here is one of those lost fragrances that stirs the senses and the imagination... (researched and described  with the help of the perfume writer  Dimitrios Dimitriadis)

ROGER & GALLET - VERA VIOLETTA

Long-standing perfume and toiletries giants Roget et Gallet launched Vera Violette in 1892 at the height of La Belle Époque… it was also the first violet perfume to combine natural violet leaf oil and synthetic alpha and beta ionones. Vera Violetta was released as a parfum essence in highly concentrated form. Its pretty, saccharine opening of violets veil a deeper, huskier core. A swelling herbaceous accord swims beneath the surface alongside a husky dry-grass note which furnishes the perfume with fathomless depth. There is a slightly animalic leathery facet which, whilst fleeting, renders this perfume an "abstract" of violets, and an incredible one at that. Sadly, whilst it has been reprised several times over the decades since, Vera Violetta has now retired and remains to this day a perfume pillar of yesteryear.

To find out more about Rose's newest release, The Book of Lost Fragrances, please visit the Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tour website.

Guest Author Post: How to Make Saturnalia Cookies from Stephanie Dray

How to Make Saturnalia Cookies

by

Stephanie Dray

In my debut novel, Lily of the Nile: A Novel of Cleopatra’s Daughter, my heroine’s first Saturnalia is a thing of wonder. Though her father was Mark Antony, the famed Roman general, Selene had been raised a Princess of Egypt, which meant that many ancient Roman traditions would have been as unusual to her as they are to us. In the book, Saturnalia is the first time since being taken as an orphaned prisoner of war that Selene starts to find her place with her new Roman family.

It’s the scents and the sounds of the Saturnalia festival that allow Selene to bond with the emperor’s daughter, Julia, and of course the food. We can’t forget the food. The holiday feasts we all enjoy today are but a pale mimicry of ancient Roman banquets.

Part of the enjoyment I get out of researching ancient times is discovering the way they ate and celebrated. One Saturnalia tradition that figures into the novel is when all the guests take a Saturnalia pastry and the guest whose pastry has a bean hidden inside of it is named the King of the Saturnalia or the Lord of Misrule. I thought it might be fun to reproduce this tradition for the holiday season.

The Romans did have pastries and they enjoyed sweet deserts, but they were different from those we enjoy now because the Romans didn’t use butter or sugar, and they didn’t have baking soda or baking powder. They did, however, have other substitutes. For butter, they often substituted a sweet creamy cheese. For sugar, they used honey. For leavening they sometimes used eggs. This led them to create hearty and rustic pastries with flours, seeds, fruit, oil.

To make a Saturnalia cookie, one might take any sort of modern oatmeal cookie and hide a raisin inside one of them. That’s the easy way, and given the Roman penchant for practicality, they would approve wholeheartedly.

However, if you want to go the old fashioned route, try this recipe:

Roman Globuli Pastries

½ Cup Flour

½ Cup Ricotta Cheese (Whole Milk)

¼ Cup Honey

⅓ Cup Olive Oil

1 Raisin

Mix the Flour and Ricotta Cheese in a bowl with a fork until it forms a stiff dough. With wet fingers, roll dough into 1 inch balls. Inside one of those balls, hide a raisin. Heat oil in a pan on high, then lightly fry the dough balls until golden brown. When the dough balls are cooked through, roll them in honey. Chill and Serve.

I made these tonight and they result in a light doughy pastry, perfect with marsala wine!

BIO

Stephanie Dray is the author of a forthcoming trilogy of historical fiction novels set in the Augustan Age, starting with Lily of the Nile: A Novel of Cleopatra's Daughter. Before she wrote novels, Stephanie was a lawyer, a game designer, and a teacher. Now she uses the transformative power of magic realism to illuminate the stories of women in history and inspire the young women of today. She remains fascinated by all things Roman or Egyptian and has–to the consternation of her devoted husband–collected a house full of cats and ancient artifacts.

 

 She is currently sponsoring the Cleopatra Literary Contest for Young Women, the deadline for which is March 1, 2011, but join her newsletter now for updates and a chance to win a free copy of Lily of the Nile and additional prizes.

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