Monday, August 03, 2009
Fishtails
Something new about the cod from Friday, consumed on Saturday. Being a smaller quantity than usual, cooked it in a white enamel pie dish, rather than the much larger glass dish. In fact, just the sort of dish that would have been used to hold the fish for the family when I was a child. Clearly eating a lot more than we need now. Covered fish and etc with foil rather than the butter paper that would have been used when a child. But what was odd was that, cooking for about an hour as usual, there was very little juice at the bottom of the pan. Normally we get half a pint or more; on this occasion virtually none, even allowing for the smaller quantity of fish to get it from. The only significant differance was the use of a metal dish rather than a glass one, with the lower specific heat (a term which has miraculously and correctly surfaced from the O-level physics of the distant past) of metal meaning that I was getting more cooking for my money and so more evaporated juice. Against that, the fish was not overcooked, so all a bit of a mystery. Maybe it was a dry fish?
Yesterday was the turn of Sussex Pie. Take four pounds of stewing steak, cut across the grain and which appeared to be arranged in three muscles, two close coupled and the third more loosely coupled. Place at bottom of large glass dish. Add a single onion cut into eighths. Add three tablespoons of port and three tablespoons of mushroom ketchup, which I am allowed to use on this occasion, FIL being away for a few days. Cover with a double layer of foil (too small to be able to make a parcel with it) and cover again with the dish's lid. Cook for six hours at 120C, then one and a half hours at 90C, then drain of the pint or so of gravy and rest for half an hour. Liquidise the onions in the gravy, work in a little glutened flour to thicken a little and return to heat in a saucepan. Add some coarsely chopped mushroom heads and more finely chopped mushroom stalks. Simmer for a bit. Meanwhile, cook mashed potatoes, cauliflower and carrots. Remembering not to peel the carrots, it making so much differance to the flavour and texture of the product. Take solid ingredients with a little Amarande, this last courtesy of Odd Bins. All very good. Sauce excellent. But might have been even better had I cooked the meat for another couple of hours.
As it is, what was left doing quite well cold in the breakfast sandwiches.
All this to accompany my new read. Last week, the French amazon invited me to buy some more books like the last one I bought from them. So I did, and so I now have two more Fred Vargas policiers. It turns out, quite by accident, that one is the sequel of the other. But I did not know this until I was well into the sequel first, a tale involving, amongst other things, three stags killed in an inappropriate way. Don't suppose reading the books in the wrong order matters much. But a good read, once one gets back into the vocabulary. Every author seeming to be differant in that regard. Not something that I notice when reading books in English. Much verse, some from Racine, some from Corneille and some, I think, invented.
I deduce this last by typing some lines from the book into Mr G. and drawing a blank. I then get out my midget edition of Racine, from the King's printer at Paris and Briere, dated 1824 (found in a now defunct secondhand bookshop at Sunbury), and try typing in a few lines from that. Mr G. finds two out of three. From which we deduce that someone has seen fit to digitise some, but not all of Racine. Although the missing one might have been a misprint in my copy of Racine, a misprint or a typo in theirs. I assume that a quoted search requires an exact match after ignoring punctation, accents and capitalisation, a procedure which leaves plenty of room for error. But searching for strings like this without quotes gives too much noise to be of any use at all. I wonder what would happen if I were to try Shakespeare? Or Conrad? Or speeches from the collected works of Mickey Mouse? Altogether a fertile field of enquiry.
The book pulls the same stroke as Dan Brown in his code book, if my understanding of this last, unread, is correct. That is to say you build your story (2006 for Vargas, against 2003 for Brown) around some medieval nonsense, in this case a recipe to make an immortalising potion, involving all kinds of mysterious and dodgy ingredients. For the story to work one does not have to believe the nonsense, but just to believe that some nutter could. Works very well.
# posted by Jim @ 2:04 AM 
