by Stephanie Dray | Nov 25, 2011 | Food, Fun Stuff, Miscellany
Guest post by Shawn LambMention French food and automatically people think rich butter sauces, truffles and Julia Child making sense of French cuisine for the American palate. However, during the 17th century, France was still a feudal country and regional cooking...
by Stephanie Dray | Nov 22, 2011 | Food, Fun Stuff, Miscellany
So, we all know about the wine. Falernian, Caecuban, etc. Ancients drank the stuff in copious quantities. But what else did they drink? This was a point of inquiry for me when writing Song of the Nile: A Novel of Cleopatra’s daughter who became the highly...
by Stephanie Dray | Nov 19, 2011 | Miscellany, My Works, Song of the Nile
To the ancient Romans, just about everyone was a barbarian. (Except the Greeks, who gave them the word in the first place, not to mention an inferiority complex to go with it.) Whether it was Blue Picts of Scotland or Gallic and Germanic hordes, the Romans generally...
by Stephanie Dray | Nov 15, 2011 | Cleopatra Selene, Daughters of the Nile, Lily of the Nile, Research, Song of the Nile
The ancient kingdom of Mauretania, once ruled by Juba II and Cleopatra Selene, is lost to the sands of time. But there are the ruins. I’ve posted photos of the area near Selene’s capital city, Iol-Caesaria, modern-day Cherchell Algeria. Now, thanks to...
by Stephanie Dray | Nov 15, 2011 | Miscellany
Announcing Historical Foodie Fridays Epicureanism is a very old philosophy that extolled, among other things, the virtues of pleasure. Too often, history is viewed as a dry and painful intellectual exercise–and I’ve often argued that historical fiction...
