Bacon from heaven
TOCINO DE CIELO, n. This noun is a Spanish dessert, sort of like a flan, and I encountered on it a restaurant menu this week while out celebrating J’s birthday. I always tell people that restaurant menus are the hardest thing to read in any language. Sometimes people think I’m joking, but I’m not. I often can’t read them in English. The fancier the restaurant, the more likely the menu is to have foreign words, or words that would be easily understood if they would just write, say, “shishito pepper” instead of “shishito.” I’m always holding my phone under the table so I can google various peppers, mushrooms, cuts of meat, and types of fish.
Cuts of meat and fish are the most inscrutable if you’re a vegetarian in another country. I don’t know what an escalope is in English or in French. Bavette? Sirloin? I mentally replace all these words with “piece of meat,” which makes the menu sound significantly less hoity-toity.
I can’t tell fish apart, either, so there’s a whole bunch of French words that show up on menus—dorade, cabillaud, morue—that just mean “fish” to me. I only know this because I just refreshed my memory by googling, but that’s “sea bream,” “cod,” and “cod,” respectively. (There are apparently a lot of words for “cod,” further confusing the issue.) The best French word for a fish is loup de mer, which means sea wolf but which is, tragically, translated “sea bass” in English. I can’t picture it either way. It’s a fish.
Once, J and I went to an aquarium in France and every fish tank had a label that identified the common name of the fish, the scientific name, and also assigned it a “deliciousness” (qualité gastronomique) rating out of five stars. This also sounds like a joke but is not.
Anyway, in French and in English, menu-ese is designed to make you think the restaurant is serving something really special. When the menu is inscrutable, you have to ask your server what things are, and then they can wax poetic for ten seconds about local farms or cooking methods or something. It’s like when your cursor lights up in a video game and you know you can click on the character in that market stall to have a little dialogue with them.
The dialogue is not usually about the origin of the words, though, and that’s always what I want. Let’s go back to tocino de cielo, this not-a-flan Spanish dessert, whose literal translation is “bacon from heaven.”
Here is a photo I nabbed from Wikipedia of some tocinillos de cielo. These are a lot yellower than the other photos I’ve found, but I’m trying not to step on any copyright toes, so this is the image you all get.
When I saw the word tocino, I really wanted it to have something to do with “tocsin,” an alarm bell. Maybe the dessert is bell-shaped, I thought. But nope. Tocino is some kind of bacon or lard, and it comes to Spanish directly from Latin tuccetum, a centuries-long unbroken lineage of European Gentiles eating pork.
(Tocsin comes from Provençal tocar, to touch, and senh, signal bell. So that’s pretty straightforward, too.)
There’s no bacon in the dessert, though. Whether it’s called tocino de cielo or the diminutive tocinillo ce cielo, it’s a custard made of egg yolks. The connection to pork products is pretty obscure. I guess custard and lard are sort of the same color? I don’t know.
The internet also can’t seem to agree on whether this dessert originated in medieval or nineteenth-century Spain. The story is clearer on other aspects: the dessert is from Jerez, in southern Spain, which is also where sherry comes from. Sherry production requires egg whites, so wineries always had a surplus of egg yolks, which they gave to their local convent. The nuns used the egg yolks to make this dessert, hence it is de cielo, “from heaven.”
Because cielo is “sky” as well as “heaven,” you can also translate this dessert name as sky bacon—as opposed to earth bacon, the kind people eat with eggs and toast. J joked that now we just have to figure out what constitutes fire bacon and water bacon, and then we’ll have mastered all four elemental bacons.
Water bacon is probably a fish of some kind, so I’m never gonna figure that out.
It sure would have been thematic if I’d finished reading Eugène Briffault’s Paris à table this week in Capital-R Romance, because then I could keep talking about gastronomy, but I didn’t do that so I’m changing the subject now.
In small-r romance, this week I had the privilege of beta reading unpublished drafts from two friends, which is always great fun. I also read a few other things:
The Craft of Love (trans het m/cis bi f, historical, novella) by EE Ottoman. This is so sweet, and I love the details about silversmithing and quilt-making. This novella paints such a complex picture of artisan life in nineteenth-century New York. Content warnings: mentions of transphobia and gender dysphoria.
Marriage of Unconvenience (f/f, both cis and lesbian, contemporary) by Chelsea M. Cameron. This is total spun-sugar fluff, but it’s delightful to see romance’s trope-y genre conventions—the ornery relative who won’t let you inherit until you’re married, the couple of friends who are only in it for the inheritance money—applied to a relationship between two women. Loren’s repeated insistence that Cara is “completely and totally” straight made me lose my shit every time. You know it’s real when you have to use two adverbs. There are a couple little blips in continuity—a supporting character is described as gay, and then straight, and good at keeping secrets, then a blabbermouth—but it was enjoyable enough that I didn’t mind. Content warnings: sex.
The Queen of Ieflaria (f/f, both cis and bi, fantasy) by Effie Calvin. This is a very cute fantasy novel with Tamora Pierce vibes. I’ve said before that I tend to think of fantasy as High Magic or Low Magic, and this has mages making swords out of lightning-like energy, dragons, unicorns, and the gods walking the earth, so it is definitely High Magic. A teeny, tiny SPOILERY detail: naturally, being the type of nerd I am, I really wanted to know why or how Adale could read the dragon script, and I felt there was not enough fanfare over her suddenly being able to parse a book in an unknown language. Is she magic after all? Is she part dragon? Was it the hand of the gods? Maybe it’ll be explained in the sequel. Content warnings: a main character’s brother has recently died, grief.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I also returned to making my way ever so slowly through the brilliant sci-fi novel A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. I am reading slowly not because it is bad but because it is good.
Also, at this point, I confess I’m also going slow to torment J, who has wanted me to read this for months so we can discuss it, and was excited when I first picked it up and then crushed when I put it down to deal with a sudden accumulation of library ebooks, which, like snowfall, arrive all at once and must be cleared out of the way before life can go on. So for the past few weeks, J has teased me every time I’m reading some other book, which—as you may know from this newsletter—is all the time.
I considered getting my vengeance by only reading A Memory Called Empire when J is not looking, finishing it in secret, and then not telling him I’d finished until the next time he teased me, but I ruined my own plan by tweeting about the book in the middle of reading it.
Felicia "Ray" Davin @FeliciaDavin
do you ever read a book so good that its creation is completely opaque to you? you can't imagine ever writing anything so beautiful, can't begin to comprehend how anyone could, so you're stuck assuming this book washed up on the shore cradled in a seashell, perfectly formed
December 1st 2019 22 Retweets 245 Likes
Books are funny things, because they’re just one long string of words, in the way that a sweater is one long, carefully tangled piece of yarn. In theory you can see exactly how books are constructed when you read them. But when I’m reading something as complex and fascinating as A Memory Called Empire, I genuinely can’t comprehend how it was made. It’s all one word after the other word, except it’s really, really not.
So I am savoring this book, which has a five-star deliciousness rating for its discussions of language and identity, and some day perhaps I will finish it and talk about it.
One last note: an excerpt of my forthcoming (tomorrow!) romance novel Out of Nowhere (gay m/bi m, both cis, sci-fi) was posted at Love in Panels this week, should that be of interest to you.
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