nineveh_uk

Right, I shall put my question plainly: Why does cooking meat - I think possibly white meat more than red, but this might simply be a matter of memory - remind me of the smell of the preserved rats we dissected in A-level biology, and sometimes make my eyes sting? It's not a bad smell, rats notwithstanding, but it is very distinctive.

I cannot work out why this should be. It happens with chicken, with pork, with pheasant or wild rabbit, so it isn't about slaughter or preserving*. It is not onion or garlic, it happens regardless of whether they are in the dish, before they go in, and not with vegetarian food. It isn't alcohol. It could be oil, but then why is it not oil when cooking pancakes, vegetables, or bacon? It's not that the meat is high. It's not the type of cookware - enamel, steel, non-stick, it can happen with any of them. My oven certainly needs cleaning, but it isn't the oven, because it doesn't happen with foods that don't contain meat, and when I only fry. It's not a taste, just a smell. It is not coronavirus, not only did my sense of smell return to normal, but this is of much longer standing. It isn't my house or my method, I experience the same smell when other people cook.

It has to be something to do with meat, oil, or flour or a combination of the three. I think it is most likely the latter. But I have no idea which or how in terms of the chemistry. Does anyone else experience this, or have any suggestions?


Dead rat smell notwithstanding, I do this evening have what will hopefully be a nice chicken casserole to serve to my parents for dinner tomorrow. The rest of the house is not exactly ready, but as my youngest sister says, "Perpendicular angles!" and I shall run around tomorrow lunchtime making things line up.

*Possibly it also happens with darker meats, but it is rabbit that it is most striking with. Possibly e.g. beef has a stronger smell of its own or in addition? I am not sure that I have ever smelt it with lamb.

At the end of last week I felt really tired and was staggering badly through the working days, so when I was tired over the weekend and still tired on Monday, I decided that I needed an extra day off and having no meetings on Friday duly booked one. Naturally, by Thursday evening I was feeling a lot better than the previous week, but I'm not going to complain about that.

The great thing about a Day Off is that it is extra, with no feeling of obligation or trying to fit things in. So today I have:

* Got up late. This was very nice, especially as having been woken by some warm nights I had taken Nytol to make sure I slept better and thus slept until 8'clock albeit with some really weird dreams. I read some of the commercially published translation of the novel of The Untamed/Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation. Reader, as a book it is pretty fun*, but as a translation it is dreadful, and I can tell that without speaking a word of Chinese. But more on that another post.

* Got up eventually to watch the women's mass start biathlon race. I'm not as big a biathlon fan as a cross-country ski one, but it is unquestionably a sport that reaches its peak at major championships when the panic sets in on the shooting range.

* Moved the car to take its chances with roof tiles rather than tree branches on account of Storm Eunice (it is fine, as is everything here but someone's dull bush. But it was very, very windy). Also watched jets land in the wind at Heathrow.** Best performer of those I saw was EgyptAir, who looked like they were in a dead calm. I shall never worry about my plane being buffeted on a mildly breezy day again.

* Ironed to the men's biathlon. Farewell, biathlon, it was a good Games. Plus now I have fresh pillowcases.

* Cut out some of a new lino cut print design to various other bits of Olympics. I keep forgetting how hard I find it on my shoulders at the moment, but I like the design.

* Made the venison ragout part of Tom Kitchin's venison ragout lasagne. I should love to have it in lasagne form, which I have looked at in the recipe book in my parents' kitchen and salivated over, but that's just a bit too much effort for me at the moment. The deconstructed version certainly smells like it will be delicious with papardelle.

Plus receiving a supermarket delivery and cleaning half the bathroom. Not bad going really. And I still have the weekend to go.


* I could wish I had read it without having seen the TV series, for such moments as "hang on, third person POV, have you just skipped blithely over our protagonist doing a little light grave-robbing?" and wondering how on earth things were going to work out.

** I am now imagining the MJN Air version of this...

I know, I thought on Friday afternoon after a busy (half) week of work. I will do the hoovering know, removing the infuriating bits of navy fluff all over the carpets, and then I will not need to do any housework over the weekend and can luxuriate in time and do art and write fic and maybe even review it. And I did hoover, and then spent the entirety of Saturday feeling rubbish, watching skiing, whinging at antisoppist, re-watching a rom-com with frequent pauses, and worst of all not having any cake/ I needed cake, but I had no cake and could face neither making nor going out into the cold to purchase it.

Happily today I felt brighter and therefore did some art, wrestled 500 words of fic into submission** (though not without taking some punches), and most important of all, made Nigella Lawson's emergency brownies. Inevitably I slightly overcooked them*, so they are not as squidgy as they might be, but they are very acceptable. I also have squirty cream kept for such emergencies, and am going to learn from this and ensure that tomorrow's supermarket order contains adequate amounts of cake-like substances so I am not left clawing the pantry shelves and finding only out of date KitKats. And tomorrow heralds the end of the cold weather so I can stopped feeling constantly pinched and actually leave the house, hurray!

*I do this with brownies and thus set the timer very conservatively, but they were not parting from the side of the tin like the recipe said they would, so I let them carry on a bit. Mistake.

**That venerable sub-genre, Prince Jing finds out.

I don't know about best, but certainly ranking pretty highly is going into the butcher's just before early closing on a Saturday on the off-chance that they have any Longley Farm yoghurt left, and finding that they have two pots - one rhubarb, and one gooseberry! I didn't even know that they did gooseberry, and now I've just had it for breakfast. It is not as good as the rhubarb, but then the rhubarb might just be my chosen last supper. And the ingredients are what they should be: yoghurt, gooseberry, just enough sugar.

Less good is that it costs twice what it would in Leeds, but you can't have everything. I need to start doing Morrisons or Asda deliveries.

I am delighted to be able to confirm that pickled onions count as one of one's 5-a-day.

I have achieved sloe jelly. It is very purple and my kitchen is not, which counts as a success. It also tastes nice, and thus is not a total waste of time, sugar, and electricity. As an added bonus, it forced me to hunt through my fridge for extra jam jars and chuck out stuff that ought to have been chucked out some time ago. No more does the jar of out-of-date grated horseradish haunt the fridge door! On the other hand, though the colour is lovely, the texture good, and the taste has just the right hint of the ability of sloes to suck every particle of moisture from your mouth, there's no denying that ultimately wild hedgerow fruits taste pretty similar once preserved. If I do it again, I think I'll look at adding some sort of spice for additional flavour.

Pictures on LJ.

I had a very enjoyable day yesterday meeting a friend in London and going to Simpson's in the Strand for lunch, followed by the Fashion on the Ration exhibition at the Imperial War Museum.

Simpson's is the restaurant that features in Murder Must Advertise as the location to which hapless Willis tracks Wimsey and Pamela Dean, where he eats mutton and is miserable. It traditionally serves a lot of roast meat. And other things, but mostly roast meat. Some might question the wisdom of arranging to eat a large amount of roast beef at lunchtime on a hot July day in central London, but as the place is air conditioned, this was in fact very easy to do. It was a lot of fun, and not only was the beef (and roast potatoes, horseradish etc,) excellent, but so were the puddings.

Thence to the IWM's exhibition space, which was not air conditioned, and the warmth of which could not simply be put down to the lunch. The exhibition, on clothing during WWII, was fascinating, though (thanks to white_hart for alerting me to its existence), and we agreed that the WRNS definitely had the best uniform, and that there was quite a bit of the Utility clothing that we'd actually purchase if Marks and Spencer's did it as a special line. I have some bits of clothing alterations to do that I have been putting off*; perhaps I should watch Enigma and re-enact 'Make Do and Mend'.

*I hate alterations. They are often quite tricky and you don't even get anything new.

Following a request, this is the menu served by Babette at the famous feast in Berlevaag (short story*) and Nørre Vosborg (film), possibly the bleakest place in literature short of Scott's South Pole. We decided that the spirit was what really mattered. I shall spare you the lines from the film uttered at key moments.

***

Turtle soup

Turtle is not available to the UK domestic chef. We therefore cast around for substitutes. Mock turtle soup involves boiling a calf's head. My mother vetoed lobster bisque, which she dislikes (I wish I'd had the chance!). Several people vetoed crab. We therefore compromised on salmon and dill ravioli (purchased). I had a symbolic glass of Amontillado earlier.

Blini Demidoff

Blinis with sour cream and caviar. No, of course it wasn't real sturgeon black caviar!

Caille en Sarcophage

According to people on the internet who know more about French cooking than I, these little boneless quails in pastry baskets are stuffed with foie gras and black truffles, and served with sauce Périgueux. My mother actually has a recipe for sauce Périgueux. We decided, however, that the spirit of the thing required the quails in their baskets, with head, and that the sauce/stuffing was up to the circumstances concerned. We went for boneless quails** stuffed with chestnut, mushroom and bacon stuffing, in a cherry sauce, and I modelled the heads out of shortcrust pastry, observing as I went along how key features like peppercorn eyes make something that looks nothing like a quail's head look exactly like a quail's head. I'd invoke Umberto Eco, but I drove home today.

Chicory and walnut salad

Easy! We also added a second salad, of pomegranate, orange, and walnut.

Cheese and Fruit

Nowadays one can buy tropical fruits in December from Sainsbury's. Though fruit-wise you should probably concentrate on the grapes/dates/fig end of things. Cheese to taste, but do include a blue one.

Savarin

Turns out to be incredibly easy to make, though it helps if your mother doesn't discover that she has lost her debit card as she is in the act of paying for a ring mould at Lakeland. Fortunately it later turned out that she had left it in the machine, which had eaten it, but it rather put paid to our trip to Harrogate. In any case, savarin takes time, as you have to leave the dough to prove twice, but it is easy and looks good filled with unseasonal fruits. In lieu of a rum sauce, which no-one wanted, we had an orange syrup with Malvasia***.

***

So there you go. It took a fair amount of time, but was not otherwise difficult for a family cook who can put Christmas dinner on the table without stressing for the nation of their choice. For one thing, there are relatively few issues of acute timing. We split up the courses between 4 for the sake of not spending all day in the kitchen (it was a surprise for persons 5+6, my sister and brother-in-law who came down that day), and though I wouldn't serve the whole lot up for a dinner party unless I really liked the people involved, none of the individual courses was particularly onerous, at least if, like us, you invoked the spirit and not the vast quantities of truffles. And champagne, which we decided just to have as an apertif. The singing of Danish psalms in their subtitled English versions is optional.

*For anyone who is not familiar with the film: HIRE IT NOW, although not, and I cannot stress this strongly enough for those who live in the USA, in the dubbed version. I have no idea what non-English dubs are like. The film is based on the story by Isak Dinesen first published in the Ladies Home Journal (USA) as Dineksen's response to a bet that she couldn't publish a magazine story on the meaning of art. It was subsequently republished in the collection Anecdotes of Destiny. It is wonderful. It is also responsible for a fondly-remembered moment of classroom triumph on my part, when watching it the week before Christmas in my Danish language class in Odense. As General Löwenhielm gave his speech (in Swedish, we were watching with Danish subtitles) my neighbour turned to me and said, "What is he saying?" My reply: "Mercy and truth are met together. Righteousness and peace are met together. Man, in his weakness and shortsightness, believe he must make a choice here in life". Etc. Cue stunned silence. I had discovered at the start of the film-showing that I had seen it so often I had memorised the subtitles. I admitted this - at the end of the film.

**If you can't get boneless quails locally - central Oxford is light on bakers, but rich in butchers - and I believe that you can bone them yourself. Personally, I'd just leave the bones to the diners.

***Present for parents from Lipari, where there has recently been a murder. Who'd have thought Sicily had a lower murder rate than the Faeroes? I had Baba aux Malavasie from a wonderful cake shop in Lipari town. Actually, I had it twice, as the first time I took a bite and accidentally dropped it in the gutter.

One of many great things about my middle school was its enthusiastic approach to that suite of lessons that includes under art, woodwork, and home economics (i.e. sewing and cookery), in which we spent a great deal of time doing things, and none at all designing packaging and such things that seem now to be called “design and technology”. As a result of which I can theoretically use an exciting range of nasty electrical saws and drills (not that I often have occasion to), and everyone in the class could sew on a button and turn up a hem. I can also make pastry. We spent an entire half-term on pastry and bread (the previous two years were “ensuring all ten year olds can feed themselves”, followed by “ensuring all eleven year olds can cook for a family”). My sisters, who attended the rather more carefully socially selected CofE school, learnt to ice a swiss roll. They left after two years in order not to die of boredom.

Anyway, we made pastry. Our teacher was a splendid woman who worked part-time and played golf on her days off, and she believed that we should all be able to make shortcrust pastry, and do it properly. We made shortcrust pastry for three weeks. So it is directly thanks to her that I finally got round last night to embarking upon recreating the chocolate mince pies that I bought a couple of years ago. And so I give you:

( Chocolate mince pies )