P D Ball’s Story Newsletter No. 2

Sep 19, 2022 6:09 am

P D Ball’s Story Newsletter No. 2

Hello! I hope this email finds you well. Better than well!

As per the title, this is the second newsletter. I’m going to find a place to compile them all in case anyone wants to read through them. No. 1, for ex., has a preview of Book 4, which may interest people who’ve signed up recently. You can always fire me an email if you want the preview.

Progress Update

Behind the Scenes: lead sugar and barley-tallow porridge

Other Book Promotions

Progress Update

I’m happy to say that Book 4 is coming along. It’s 85% written, so that’s great news. After that, though, it has to go through a lot of editing.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an additional preview for you right now.

If you want to contact me, your thoughts on the newsletter or writing, I’m at pdballwrites@gmail.com

Behind the Scenes: Lead Sugar and Tallow and Barley

One of the first things that bothers Cayce is the “lead sugar,” aka lead acetate, in the wine. As bizarre as it sounds to us, where developed nations have outlawed the use of lead in foods, make-up and limited our exposure to it as much as possible, lead acetate was used in Ancient Greece and Rome in the winemaking industry. Additional lead got into beverages as a by-product of the metal being in their processing tools and drinking cups.

Lead acetate was added to wines in the ancient world for two reasons: to sweeten wines and as a preservative. Apparently, and don’t actually taste this to find out, lead acetate is sweet. And it is toxic to life, so keeps wine and juice tasty and fresh. Yum!

Wines with higher sugars produce higher alcohol percentages. One trick the ancients used to increase sugar concentrations was to leave grape juice out on wide, shallow plates. The water evaporated, leaving a heavier concentration of sugar. Sugar, like salt, is a preservative at high concentrations, so this method also reduced spoilage. The problem is that these plates were made out of lead – it’s much, much easier to work with than iron – and that leached into the juice, as it did when people drank out of then-produced pewter, which also contained lead.

While combing through the literature on this subject, the first piece I found discussing these ancient practices claimed that lead acetate is not very bioavailable, meaning it doesn’t absorb well into our bodies. The article went on to say that the Ancient Greek and Romans therefore didn’t suffer much from lead poisoning.

This is false. I’ve since found scientific study after study detailing how readily bioavailable lead is when consumed as lead acetate. If you drink it, and you really, really shouldn’t, it’ll get into your blood, liver and bones. In high enough concentrations, it damages and kills brain cells, causing dementia and likely other mental illnesses.

Lead has a half-life in our blood of 36 hours. It’s pulled out of the blood by the liver, our bones and by antioxidants. The liver stores it to keep it from harming our brains and bodies (it has myriad effects on hormone messaging systems and is neurotoxic) and attempts to get rid of it. To rid our bodies of lead, our liver throws antioxidants at the metal, which allows it to be sent out in our urine.

However, lead binds very quickly to our bones. Unfortunately, its half-life there is measured in years to decades in adults. In developing children, pregnant women and during osteoporosis, the metal can get kicked back into the blood, where it may be removed (or concentrated in worst case scenarios). Although, it would likely have very negative effects on developing children.

So, Cayce was right to avoid such sweetened wine. And, take your vitamin pills, get those antioxidants inside you!

Regarding the tallow and barley mix that Cayce didn’t like. This dish is based on a 16^th century recipe I randomly found, which I altered to make worse tasting, and common beliefs among Roman gladiators. People throughout history had various ideas about what foods made people strong, gave them stamina, energy, and so on.

Roman gladiators thought that barley made them strong. It was therefore a staple of their diets and they were even nicknamed “barley men.”

The 16^th century dish claimed strength and health was found in animal fats. So, barley and oats were cooked, lard was added generously, and this itself was eaten. In Germany, beer, even wines, were mixed in, and barley was thought of as promoting health.

As lard can taste quite good, I ruined this dish for Cayce by substituting tallow. Tallow is fat found in cattle and deer and, at least in modern times, is not recommended for cooking for the taste can be very strong. But, I’ve rendered fat from steaks to sear them in, and it was quite tasty, though many sources suggest deer and other wild game tallow is too strong to eat. However, I bet this sentiment is because of modern sensitivities in our foods – we like our food to be moderate in flavor and not very gamey. Thankfully, we have lots of spices and ways of removing the gamey taste in meat.

I suspect people of the past were fine with even strong, gamey meats, for a few reasons. First, they didn’t have refrigeration. Second, wild animals would have been a larger portion of their diet than in ours. Third, historical recommendations for storing meat sometimes suggest the animals be left for up to a week. If you’ve read the novel, Shogun, the main character in that story hangs a pheasant outdoors for a week, but the local Japanese people cut it down in disgust. These instructions are straight out of old recipe books, some even called for the pheasants to not be cleaned until after a week. I imagine that almost none of us would want to eat poultry that was hung at room temperature for a week!

Probably, if we suddenly were transported into historical times, we’d find their foods strongly flavored, gamey, full of fat, and possibly difficult to eat. I wanted to portray that to some extent, and differing ideas of what foods were healthy and conferred stamina, so happily gave Cayce the worst tasting version of the barley dish I could.

That dish, plus the sweetened wine, was enough to get her to violently spit it out and try to clean her mouth.

Extra reading if you want to learn more about the above:

A BBC piece about the gladiators mostly grain based diet. It says “they were mostly vegetarian,” but we have to remember, they didn’t think about food the way we do. They were eating what they could get a hold of and what they thought built up their strength:

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-29723384

Lead in wine making throughout history: https://www.winemag.com/2020/07/20/lead-toxicity-wine-history/

A not too technical paper on the dangers of lead:

https://labs.icahn.mssm.edu/toddlab/bone-lead-test/

A serious scientific paper on lead poisoning: https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/get_the_lead_out/pdfs/health/Needleman_2004.pdf

Other Author Book Promotions

Ok, so these are promotions I agreed to do in trade for the same. It’s key for authors to reach larger audiences. These are works from authors in similar genres who’ve agreed to list my work in their email newsletters and promotions.

I have vetted these works to the extent that I tried to eliminate erotica and anything that triggered my ‘yuck’ response. But that’s as far as I went. I haven’t read any of these as I’m trying to get Princess Cayce’s story out as quickly as possible. Regardless, maybe one of these books will appeal to you. Some of them look interesting to me and I might add them to my reading list.

Kindle Unlimited fantasy novels:

https://storyoriginapp.com/to/SXMnTr7

This one is for Sword & Sorcery books (mine’s in there, too!):

StoryOrigin (storyoriginapp.com)

Fantasy novels with a dark twist:

StoryOrigin (storyoriginapp.com)

Portal fantasies, where the main character finds themselves in another reality:

StoryOrigin (storyoriginapp.com)

Individual book mentions. These authors are mentioning Princess Cayce to their readers, so I’m returning the favor:

The Forbidden: A Fantasy Romance Series (The Ancestors Saga, Book 1) (English Edition):

https://storyoriginapp.com/swaps/47b5a376-2539-11ed-8e57-f7974d8b423c

Stonebearer's Betrayal (Shadow Barrier Trilogy Book 1) (English Edition):