Friday, December 16, 2011
Oxtail
Just finished the broth from the oxtail noticed on 14th December. Thinned with water and thickened with left over boiled white rice. Hearty warming breakfast on this cold and snowy morning.
Over breakfast I read about the odd business of one of those grossly overpaid bankers being temporarily stood down with exhaustion brought on by overwork. There is talk of management changes so that his workload can be more easily managed down. Not sure that I approve of masters of the universe being struck down by something so banal as being unable to properly manage their in-trays. I thought you got your master of the universe badge precisely because you could manage all that sort of thing. That you really were a master. I wonder what the arrangements about sick pay are?
Before getting around to breakfast, a couple of snippets from a book by Margaret Visser (http://www.margaretvisser.com/) whom I first came across some years ago in a book about the rituals of dinner, which I think I had better now read again. I am grateful to Surrey Libraries for withdrawing this book from stock, the result of which being that I acquired it - although not so cheaply as I would have a couple of months ago. The ladies at the library tell me that they are now applying Oxfam rather than jumble sale policies to their cast offs.
First snippet concerns the bible story that everyone used to be taught in the days before we had faith schools, the story about the time when Jesus chucked the bankers and other undesirables out of the temple. A bible story, you might think, for modern times. The Visser take is that at the time of Jesus, the temple was arranged as a series of concentric spaces, outer spaces for the profane and inner spaces for the sacred. Money changers and animal dealers were permitted in the outermost space, along with everybody else. Jewish men and women in the next one, Jewish men in the one after that and so on and so forth. The animal dealers were there so that you could buy your sacrificial animal from someone with the seal of good housekeeping from the temple authorities and the money changers were there so that you could change your Roman coinage for the Jewish coinage needed to make a kosher purchase of your sacrificial animal. By the standards of that time this all sounds eminently reasonable. So what reason did Jesus have for upsetting the apple cart? Not something that was ever discussed in my time in RI.
Second snippet is a blast from the past for a former manufacturer of test cubes of concrete and certain related substances. One of the related substances being pulverised fly ash (PFA), of interest because of its mildly pozzolanic properties, a fancy way of saying that it was a sort of feeble cement. Many years later, I now learn from Visser that pozzolana is a sort of powdery stone derived from volcanoes which the Romans of Italy used to make their cement. A close relative of another sort of not so powdery stone derived from volcanoes into which the Romans of Rome used to cut their catacombs. From all of which we deduce that the incineration of coal in power stations - the source of the PFA - bears some relation to the sort of incineration which goes on in volcanoes.
Over breakfast I read about the odd business of one of those grossly overpaid bankers being temporarily stood down with exhaustion brought on by overwork. There is talk of management changes so that his workload can be more easily managed down. Not sure that I approve of masters of the universe being struck down by something so banal as being unable to properly manage their in-trays. I thought you got your master of the universe badge precisely because you could manage all that sort of thing. That you really were a master. I wonder what the arrangements about sick pay are?
Before getting around to breakfast, a couple of snippets from a book by Margaret Visser (http://www.margaretvisser.com/) whom I first came across some years ago in a book about the rituals of dinner, which I think I had better now read again. I am grateful to Surrey Libraries for withdrawing this book from stock, the result of which being that I acquired it - although not so cheaply as I would have a couple of months ago. The ladies at the library tell me that they are now applying Oxfam rather than jumble sale policies to their cast offs.
First snippet concerns the bible story that everyone used to be taught in the days before we had faith schools, the story about the time when Jesus chucked the bankers and other undesirables out of the temple. A bible story, you might think, for modern times. The Visser take is that at the time of Jesus, the temple was arranged as a series of concentric spaces, outer spaces for the profane and inner spaces for the sacred. Money changers and animal dealers were permitted in the outermost space, along with everybody else. Jewish men and women in the next one, Jewish men in the one after that and so on and so forth. The animal dealers were there so that you could buy your sacrificial animal from someone with the seal of good housekeeping from the temple authorities and the money changers were there so that you could change your Roman coinage for the Jewish coinage needed to make a kosher purchase of your sacrificial animal. By the standards of that time this all sounds eminently reasonable. So what reason did Jesus have for upsetting the apple cart? Not something that was ever discussed in my time in RI.
Second snippet is a blast from the past for a former manufacturer of test cubes of concrete and certain related substances. One of the related substances being pulverised fly ash (PFA), of interest because of its mildly pozzolanic properties, a fancy way of saying that it was a sort of feeble cement. Many years later, I now learn from Visser that pozzolana is a sort of powdery stone derived from volcanoes which the Romans of Italy used to make their cement. A close relative of another sort of not so powdery stone derived from volcanoes into which the Romans of Rome used to cut their catacombs. From all of which we deduce that the incineration of coal in power stations - the source of the PFA - bears some relation to the sort of incineration which goes on in volcanoes.
# posted by Jim @ 2:09 AM 
