Thursday, October 02, 2008
Culinary equilibrium
Culinary equilibrium has been restored after a week of foreign cooking. Knocked up a lentil soup which has barely survived today's breakfast and lunch. Lack of carrots meant that I had to use a chunk of coarsely sliced white cabbage in their place - but the result was OK. This including the first proper bread for a week; not having found Florentine bread all that great - a bit hard for my teeth and with a slightly odd flavour.
And we did not find any Florentine cabbages at all - although we did see a few in someone's garden from a train. They don't seem to be into our sort of vegetables at all although some find their way into soups and stews and they are keen on salads. But green mush, even fresh green mush, is not quite the same as meat and two veg.
Nor did we see much in the way of cows. We came across two large ceremonial cows waiting to pull a cart about, extravagently decorated with bottles of Chianti, as part of a Chianti growing village's promotional visit to Florence. Complete with half the village dressed up in TV Jane Austen. But, despite a train ride to Pistoia and a walk in the country there, we did not find any other cows. Or even sheds to put cows in. Or sheep, goats or any other farm animal. I think I heard a cockeral once, I did see a small lizard and a few game birds.
These last were in a large field or park, roughly grassed with large and small trees scattered about, rather in the manner of a park for an English lord, and which might have been to do with a nearby experimental station of some sort, which might have been to do with http://www.vivaistipistoiesi.it/. But it was not the sort of field or park that one might find in England.
From the train, we also saw great swathes of ornamental tree nurseries. There must have been square miles of the them - one might have thought enough to provide ornamental trees for a big chunk of Italy. After all, there were not that many in Florence itself.
But, not only were there no animals, there did not appear to be much agriculture apart from the trees. A fair bit of what looked like set aside. One field with drying maize. A few small fields which had been cultivated and were presumably waiting to be seeded or planted. Some vines. Some kitchen gardens. All in all, not too much in that line at all, down on the Arno flood plain where might have expected it. But there was plenty of industry, including what appeared to be a railway locomotive manufacturing facility, complete with railway locomotives wrapped up in white plastic and parked in the yard outside. We also came across a depository for dead railway locomotives of various shapes and sizes, all rusty. Last time I have seen such a depository was in Snoqualmie, rather bigger than that in Pistoia and a lot more scruffy than swift inspection of http://www.trainmuseum.org/ would suggest.
Back in Epsom, two factlets have already caught my eye. First, one of the lagers recently come into the frame at Wetherspoons in Tooting is called Zywiec. I now find that it is brewed in a place of the same name in what used to be a large estate belonging to one Wilhelm Franz von Hapsburg-Lothringen, a strange princeling of the late Austrian empire, who dreamed of being king of a Ukrainian state under Austrian suzerainty. I think he bothered to learn the language. Maybe it all went wrong when his bit of the Ukraine wound up in Poland. Second, that a potter's field is a name for a place for the burial of unknown or indigent people. The term is taken from a story in the Bible and a big example is a place called Hart Island in New York. Perhaps appropriate that such a godly people should use such a godly term. Wikipedia knows all about what must be rather a grim place, home to some 750,000 graves.
And we did not find any Florentine cabbages at all - although we did see a few in someone's garden from a train. They don't seem to be into our sort of vegetables at all although some find their way into soups and stews and they are keen on salads. But green mush, even fresh green mush, is not quite the same as meat and two veg.
Nor did we see much in the way of cows. We came across two large ceremonial cows waiting to pull a cart about, extravagently decorated with bottles of Chianti, as part of a Chianti growing village's promotional visit to Florence. Complete with half the village dressed up in TV Jane Austen. But, despite a train ride to Pistoia and a walk in the country there, we did not find any other cows. Or even sheds to put cows in. Or sheep, goats or any other farm animal. I think I heard a cockeral once, I did see a small lizard and a few game birds.
These last were in a large field or park, roughly grassed with large and small trees scattered about, rather in the manner of a park for an English lord, and which might have been to do with a nearby experimental station of some sort, which might have been to do with http://www.vivaistipistoiesi.it/. But it was not the sort of field or park that one might find in England.
From the train, we also saw great swathes of ornamental tree nurseries. There must have been square miles of the them - one might have thought enough to provide ornamental trees for a big chunk of Italy. After all, there were not that many in Florence itself.
But, not only were there no animals, there did not appear to be much agriculture apart from the trees. A fair bit of what looked like set aside. One field with drying maize. A few small fields which had been cultivated and were presumably waiting to be seeded or planted. Some vines. Some kitchen gardens. All in all, not too much in that line at all, down on the Arno flood plain where might have expected it. But there was plenty of industry, including what appeared to be a railway locomotive manufacturing facility, complete with railway locomotives wrapped up in white plastic and parked in the yard outside. We also came across a depository for dead railway locomotives of various shapes and sizes, all rusty. Last time I have seen such a depository was in Snoqualmie, rather bigger than that in Pistoia and a lot more scruffy than swift inspection of http://www.trainmuseum.org/ would suggest.
Back in Epsom, two factlets have already caught my eye. First, one of the lagers recently come into the frame at Wetherspoons in Tooting is called Zywiec. I now find that it is brewed in a place of the same name in what used to be a large estate belonging to one Wilhelm Franz von Hapsburg-Lothringen, a strange princeling of the late Austrian empire, who dreamed of being king of a Ukrainian state under Austrian suzerainty. I think he bothered to learn the language. Maybe it all went wrong when his bit of the Ukraine wound up in Poland. Second, that a potter's field is a name for a place for the burial of unknown or indigent people. The term is taken from a story in the Bible and a big example is a place called Hart Island in New York. Perhaps appropriate that such a godly people should use such a godly term. Wikipedia knows all about what must be rather a grim place, home to some 750,000 graves.
# posted by Jim @ 5:50 AM 
