Saturday, December 18, 2010
Brisket reprised
The brisket mentioned on 15th December is now nearing completion. In the end the thing was cooked for about 17 hours, turned once and turned up from 90C to 110C for the last couple of hours. Passed the FIL tenderness test. BH happy. I thought it tasted better cold than hot; when hot it tasted a bit insipid although there was the compensation of an interestingly stringy texture. The squeamish might be put off by the large chunks of fat surrounding the lean, fat which included the odd small pipe.
Maybe a couple of hours less cooking next time around.
I put the fat that drained out during the cooking into the dripping bowl to set. Which it did, to a firm white beef dripping, which, of course, is exactly what it was. But there was some interest on the way. While cooling there was clearly something going on just below the surface where the cooling fat was forming into irregular, rounded polygonal bubbles. Or perhaps cylinders. Some of them were even quite decent hexagons. Regular giants' causeway event.
Next point of interest was a book about a biblical heroine called Judith - a tale of sex and violence - reviewed by one Ruth Morse in a recent TLS. She is something at one of the various Parisian universities. The book is published by a gang called OpenBook (http://www.openbookpublishers.com/) and their entirely worthy idea is to publish learned work quick and cheap. Getting the stuff out to readers while it is still reasonably fresh. Additionally they put a copy on the web where anyone can look at it for free. After a while I find that you do not do this from their web site, rather from Google Books (http://books.google.co.uk/books). Get to the book in question fast enough, where I am able to test the delights of on-screen reading. Which I am not all that struck by. I am used to reading in a reclining position, not sat up in front of a television screen. Maybe it would be better with one of the tablets that you can get now - although I think I would have to pay OpenBook if I wanted something which worked on one.
The reviewer made much of the glory of reading books off the web. One's book could be festooned with hyperlinks to all kinds of fascinating collateral. Fascimiles of this and that. Illustrations. References. One's learning experience would have been leveraged up into the wonderful world of the web. Unfortunately, this book did not do that. It was a printed book which had made been available over the web. OK, there were some URLs in footnotes but the only way I could find to follow them was to transcribe them onto paper then back onto the screen - short term memory not being good for a long URL these days. Copy and paste did not seem to work in a Google Books window. What Ruth M. is perhaps missing is that it takes a lot of work to prep. a book for the sort of web experience she is thinking of. A lot of work which is unlikely to be forthcoming in the context of a low-volume on-the-cheap publisher.
I observe in passing that I was not very impressed with the online Britannica. If they can't afford to do a fancy job who can?
# posted by Jim @ 1:11 AM 
