pink bows and the apocalypse

Fandom: Hilda the Plus-Size Pin-up
Pairings/Characters: Gen; Hilda, Hilda’s animals, Hilda’s viewers, Hilda’s kindasorta personified sourdough strains.
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 2,947
Content Notes: Author Tract (COVID hygiene); canon-typical near-nudism; COVID-19 quarantine and the stresses thereof; Food Porn; music and instrument care nerdery; social media; some of Hilda’s chickens are for meat; sourdough nerdery; vintage textile nerdery.
Creator Tags: Epistolary, Pandemics, Recipes, Yuletide, Yuletide 2020
Creator Links: (AO3) ellen_fremedon, (Bluesky) ellenfremedon, (Dreamwidth) ellen_fremedon, (Tumblr) fremedon

Theme: Food & Cooking, Epistolary, Gen, Modern AU, Old Fandoms, (Secret) Hobbies, Small Fandoms

Summary: Welcome to Off the Grid at Chez Hilda, updated every Friday or whenever I feel like it. My artwork is at the Patreon link, and I don't need to remind lovely folks like you to like and subscribe, now do I?

Reccer's Notes: Hilda in 2020 is a rural lifestyle vlogger, addressing her audience from COVID quarantine and coping with lockdown in her characteristic down-home resourceful fashion (chaining canon illustrations into a storyline.)

The modernized context turns her repurposable-as-clothing floursacks into a vintage estate artifact, rhyming two historical periods of struggle and make-do as she renders them into masks. In the course of her expositions on things like feral cat rescue and wafflemaking, she casually drops evidence of an impressive and wide-ranging education; this is a woman who, in her witty conversational folksiness, gladly learns and gladly teaches. (Wonder if she and Manly Wade Wellman’s John the Balladeer ever met?)

This Hilda lives in a community, though; as the quarantine grinds wearily on, she grows increasingly fretful in her seclusion, mounting the soapbox to rant about neighbors who refuse to mask or isolate (this is 2020, before vaccines became available), and the parasocial companionship of her audience becomes increasingly precious.

Oh, and Hilda shares a recipe for her hybrid sourdough/baking powder waffles, complete with considerate substitution suggestions for various dietary limitations. (“This batter keeps in the fridge for a couple days, allegedly. I’ve never managed to test it.”)

Fanwork Links: Hilda Shelters in Place, by ellen_fremedon for Topaz_Eyes, for Yuletide 2020.

Fandom: À Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans; Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
Pairings/Characters: Gen; Duc Jean des Essientes, Gray Mouser
Rating: General Audiences (although most of the beverages might be deemed Mature, depending on your country.)
Length: 542
Creator Links: Idlewild Designs (archived); I’ve not succeeded in recovering a name for the site owner.
Theme: Food & Cooking, Book Fandoms, Meta, Pre-AO3 Works, Research, Old Fandoms, Small Fandoms

Summary: The two literary passages cited serve that purpose:

Dining off black-bordered plates, the company had enjoyed turtle soup, Russian rye bread, ripe olives from Turkey, caviare, mullet botargo, black puddings from Frankfurt, game served in sauces the color of liquorice and boot-polish, truffle jellies, chocolate creams, plum-puddings, nectarines, pears in grape-juice syrup, mulberries and black heart cherries. From dark-tinted glasses they had drunk the wines of Limagne and Roussillon, of Tenedos, Valdepeñas and Oporto. And after coffee and walnut cordial, they had rounded off the evening with kvass, porter and stout.

— a black feast held to mourn the loss of the Duc des Esseintes's virility in A Rebours, by Huysman

The collation on the little ebony table beyond the coffin consisted entirely of black foods. By sight and then by nibbling and sipping the Mouser discovered their nature: thin slices of a very dark rye bread crusted with poppy seeds and dripped with black butter; slivers of charcoal-seared steak; similarly broiled tiny thin slices of calf's liver sprinkled with dark spices and liberally pricked with capers; the darkest grape jellies; truffles cut paper thin and mushrooms fried black; pickled chestnuts; and of course, ripe olives and black fish eggs—caviar. The black drink, which foamed when he poured it, turned out to be stout laced with the bubbly wine of Ilthmar.

— Fritz Leiber, "Bazaar of the Bizarre"

Reccer's Notes: With Halloween impending, this seemed an apropos topic.

Idlewild Designs was a 2000’s Geocities purveyor of Gothic, fantasy, literary, occult, rustic, Art Nouveau, and otherwise Bohemian aesthetic living tips; here they expand and elaborate upon the two literary feasts described, with potential ingredients listed by category and outlinks to recipes. (The site was still very much under construction by the time Geocities shut down; I’m assuming the business, at least in that stage, is by now as dead as Bela Lugosi and that this post doesn’t violate the OTW’s advertising ban.)

( Literary_context. )

So what items might you add to the list? Some suggestions of my own:

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Fanwork Links: Black Feasts, by Idlewild Designs (archived.)