Intro
\nWhatever is on my mind this week.
Things I enjoyed reading
\nTen-ish articles I found worth reading.
Things I didn't know last Tuesday
\nTen-ish facts I didn't know when I wrote the previous edition.
Book of the week
\nSome thoughts on the latest book I've read.
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\nLast week I was summarising my experience of plucking and cooking feathered birds: pheasants and partridges.
\nThis week I took on a slightly heavier adventure and butchered a muntjac deer, which is one of the smallest deers in the country. The one I got was ~ 7 kg, but they don't seem to get bigger than 9-10 kg.
\n\nI sawed it into primals first, and then carefully removed all bones, packed trimmings for future minced meat, cut bigger chunks for stews, rolled to sides of a haunch, and trimmed backstrap.
\n\nOne half of the haunch was hay-baked:
\n\nAnd served with a sauce made with bone stock and mulled wine:
\n\nMost of the meat was frozen, but I took the backstrap, removed all sinew, dusted it with dried mushroom powder and then glued with transglutaminase and cooked sous vide at 55ºC for 90 min:
\n\nThen I rolled the two boules in cranberry sauce, mustard, and wrapped into duxelles and prosciutto.
\n\nThe whole thing was encased in puff pastry, garnished with rosemary and baked:
\n\nPretty happy with the outcome, served with demi glace made out of bone stock:
\n\nThe Beef Wellington is one of my favourite winter traditions, but changing it for a Venison Wellington feels great too.
\nWe're past the holiday season already, but if you are not tired of mincemeat pies, here is a story about their predecessors and the way they changed America.
\n\n\nMoreover, unlike apple pie or anything else on the American menu before or since, mince pie dominated in multiple categories. It was beloved as an entree, as dessert, and, in parts of New England, as breakfast. And although more popular in winter than summer, and absolutely mandatory at Thanksgiving and Christmas, mince pie was eaten year round, unconfined to the holiday ghetto it now shares with iffy ritual foods like eggnog, green bean casserole, and marshmallow candied yams.
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On that note, I'd love to make the real mince pies one day: cubed roast, suet, and brandy – all wrapped in dough – sound delicious.
\nLots of diets are blamed for the lack of scientific approach. Well, this can't get any more scientific than that.
\n\n\nHere’s a fun question – let’s consider, purely in the abstract, the notion of quickly putting on a lot of weight. If, hypothetically, one were to weigh themselves every day and, conceptually, throw away all of the results which showed an increase in weight, what, in a strictly Platonic sense, are the odds that actually they’re just a fat shit not actually losing any weight?
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But jokes aside, numbers give you the perspective and it's way more important than day-to-day numbers which tend to fluctuate a lot.
\nI am slightly sad to come across this concept way later than it was widespread in London, but here we are: cinemas where movies are paired with food.
\n\n\nGuests each have a tray with 8 numbered pots containing a different taster course, which are a mix of mini cocktails and canapé-sized food. At different points in the film a number flashes up next to the screen, and the audience eats or drinks the corresponding course. Courses are used to match moments when there’s food on screen, or to heighten particularly visceral points of the film.
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I'd probably watch a Harry Potter in that mode, but a small pot won't make it: a feast needs to be a feast whenever the characters are dining in the Hall.
\nOur recent adventures with plucking feathered game left me more excited for the next season than ever before.
\n\n\nMost of the grouse shot in England has historically gone to clubs like White’s and the other St James’s clubs. Their names are Wodehousian – Boodle’s, Brooks’s, Buck’s Club, the Carlton Club, the East India Club, Pratt’s, the Reform Club (where the fictitious Phileas Fogg started his journey around the world in 80 days) and the Turf Club, to name a few – each of them with an associated interest (the Turf’s, for example, is horseracing) and an infantile rivalry that mimics the inter-house competitions of their former private schools. The one thing all of them have typically had in common is that women were not allowed, unless to clean or cook, a quality they share with the most famous public (i.e. private) school for boys in the country: Eton College.
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I am not a part of the high society though, so will probably have to cook the birds myself.
\nI am very careful when it comes to trusting cookbooks (as you probably have noticed by now), and the insides of the trade only support my approach:
\n\n\nThat includes the time you need to also pitch your ideas for review by your editor. While these indie places tend to be fairly lenient, they ultimately do hold the power to say “no” to recipes and request drastic changes to your direction. So at the low end, you have 90 days to create, write, and shoot 50 recipes — under 2 days per recipe.
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It's quite different from the way big publishers (like Phaidon) work on their books though, and it still doesn't guarantee that the book will be reliable.
\nAdvents of Code are very popular but I am not a huge fan of writing code in my spare time anymore. This approach sounds like fun though: challenging yourself to use a different programming language to solve a different problem every day for a month is a good way to broaden one's horizons.
\n\n\nUsing so many languages in such a short span provided insight into the relative strengths and weaknesses of language design choices such as static versus dynamic typing and strict versus lazy evaluation.
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The tasks are getting harder the longer you play though, so I guess the order needs to be randomized to make it more interesting.
\nI can rant about performance a lot, but that's probably just professional deformation: seems like such assessments work well for certain companies or individuals, but it's incredibly hard to come up with a fair system that'd judge everyone equally:
\n\n\nI did these performance cycles for almost a decade. I loved receiving, giving, and distilling feedback, but I hated the assessments. I thought maybe I would become inured to it, but instead the opposite happened. Each cycle, it was more and more painful for me to push ratings down (something that senior management has to do in just about every one of these systems) and increasingly distressing to watch so much engineering and management effort be channeled into comparative assessment, which I'm convinced is the least valuable part of this process.
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Which means we will keep complaining about approaches for years to come.
\nI am kind of convinced that this whole article is just satire but probably the author is serious:
\n\n\nWhen you mate with shorter people, you’re potentially saving the planet by shrinking the needs of subsequent generations. Lowering the height minimum for prospective partners on your dating profile is a step toward a greener planet.
\n
To be fair, the average human height for both males and females seems to be declining during the past century or so, which probably means something.
\nMost people seem to be genuinely excited when it comes to moving to Mars but the author questions a lot about this initiative in a very detailed essay:
\n\n\nHumans who land on Mars will not be able to avoid introducing a large ecosystem of microbes to the area around the landing site. If any fugitives from the spacecraft make their way to a survivable niche on Mars, we may never be able to tell whether biotic signatures later found on the planet are traces of native life, or were left by escapees from our first Martian outhouse. Like careless investigators who didn’t wear gloves to a crime scene, we would risk permanently destroying the evidence we came to collect.
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Personally I don't doubt that a small group of people will manage to live on the planet for a few years but hardly believe it will become a dream destination in this century.
\nA pretty good way to keep a memory by using 3D printing and a camera.
\n\n\nI could've set the bust on a surface and walked around taking pictures of it, relying on software to 'clean things up' for me.
\nBut as a programmer, I know garbage in equals garbage out, and the cleaner the images, and the more precisely they are taken, the less work I'll have to do later cleaning up artifacts or touching up an imprecise model—at least that's my theory.
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Also seems like the author keeps the bust on a bottle of ketchup now, don't ask why.
\nRight, so some people put an iron fish inside their food and somehow it poisons their food... with iron.
\n\n\n\nLucky iron fish are fish-shaped cast iron ingots used to provide dietary supplementation of iron to individuals affected by iron-deficiency anaemia. The ingots are placed in a pot of boiling water to leach elemental iron into the water and food.
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I tried looking up researchers and seems like it actually does work. Someone even went further and did a testing on how easy it'd be to get an iron poisoning by using such device (spoiler: very easy if you overdo it).
\nThere is a music style that leaves space for structured improvisation.
\n\n\n\nAleatoric music (also aleatory music or chance music; from the Latin word alea, meaning \"dice\") is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer(s). The term is most often associated with procedures in which the chance element involves a relatively limited number of possibilities.
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So as a performer you get to choose how to proceed at a certain point. Sounds pretty cool, albeit not that common anymore.
\nIf you were to make annotations to a document that has a hierarchical structure, it'd introduce a second layer with overlapping markup:
\n\n\nOverlap happens, for instance, in poetry, where there may be a metrical structure of feet and lines; a linguistic structure of sentences and quotations; and a physical structure of volumes and pages and editorial annotations.
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And that's a common problem that has to be solved by fields, including programming (think XML or HTML tags).
\nLooks like the right time to travel to Milano is in winter:
\n\n\n\nCassöeula is the elaborate, high-calorie dish made from pork and cabbage that best typifies Milanese cuisine. Variously known as cassouela, cazzoeura (derived from cazza, pan), its name refers to the casserole in which it is prepared.
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Reminds me of Dutch cuisine a lot.
\nI didn't really research beavers much but this paragraph alone made me think a lot.
\n\n\nIndeed, beavers are considered “behaviorally weird,” which means no one really knows when they started building dams. No one really understands how much intelligence, as opposed to instinct, is involved in that unique activity. Animal intelligence is measured by comparing the size of the animal’s brain to the animal’s overall body weight, something called the encephalization quotient, or EQ.
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I have to ask if the author has ever seen a Platypus though?
\nIt always confused me when at official events couples would sit apart but now I understand, it's the mathematics to blame.
\n\n\n\nIn combinatorial mathematics, the ménage problem or problème des ménages asks for the number of different ways in which it is possible to seat a set of male-female couples at a round dining table so that men and women alternate and nobody sits next to his or her partner.
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Given the table above with ten place settings, there are 3120 different ways in which five male-female couples can sit at this table such that men and women alternate and nobody sits next to their partner.
\nAs you might guess, I researched a lot about hunting over the last month, but this is something new:
\n\n\n\nThe Glorious Twelfth is the twelfth day of August, the start of the shooting season for red grouse.
\n
I also consider setting up an alarm so I might get a few grouses myself as soon as they're on the market.
\nThere is still so much I could learn about soy.
\n\n\n\nEdamame is a preparation of immature soybeans in the pod, found in cuisines with origins in East Asia. The pods are boiled or steamed and may be served with salt or other condiments. In Japan, they are usually blanched in 4% salt water for 5 minutes. When the beans are outside the pod, the term mukimame is also sometimes used in Japanese.
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I don't really like edamame though (neither do I like peas, unless it's a part of a pub lunch).
\nFirst and foremost, this is a drink for hunters, but also it's a distant relative of Bloody Mary:
\n\n\nThis classic mix of beef consomme and vodka has managed to acquire an undeservedly tweedy reputation in Britain. It is often drunk hot, poured from a Thermos on crisp winter walks – the steam rising and mingling with the cloudy breath of walkers holding out their cups for a dose.
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It also justifies owning a large Thermos (which I sadly don't... yet).
\nI love the concept but also would question the food safety side of things.
\n\n\nPot-au-feu—also known as perpetual stew, forever soup, hunter’s pot, bottomless broth, master stock, or mother broth—is a culinary tradition that is practiced around the world. [...] These master stocks are never discarded. They’re handed down from one generation to the next, with some lasting several centuries.
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Although seems like some of the broths were boiling since 1400s, and were destroyed by WWII bombs, which is a surprisingly common reason for destruction among these broths.
\nFor some obscure reasons I picked up Alison K. Smith's Cabbage and Caviar which covers the history of Russian food, albeit mostly focusing on way older recipes and dishes than the ones I've tried.
\nThere is also something a bit surrealistic about reading the transliterated names for dishes I know and yet didn't have for a while, as well as stories very similar to the ones I heard from my parents:
\n\n\nI ate fried pirozhki from a stand near the main market, filled with cabbage or mushrooms or potatoes (or liver, a word I had not known and learned to avoid). I learned both that the word for a clove of garlic in Russian is a ‘tooth’ of garlic and that sliced raw garlic on bread was considered an effective way of fighting a cold. I had my first experience with pelmeni, eaten in a little restaurant in the centre of the city that served only them, dished up in bowls with a generous helping of sour cream, to be sprinkled with greyish salt from a communal bowl on the table – delicious and warming (I became curiously un-American about germs). On our group trips I also experienced a version of obshchepit in Intourist hotels, where mysterious, tough meat was the norm and I learned to envy the vegetarians in the group. (They regularly received only noodles and cheese, but that seemed a better deal than some of the odd cuts we got.) I must have had soup, as well, given how prominent it has become in my understanding of Russian food, but it is oddly absent in my journal or my memory.
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The book features a few brief recipes, like Russian soup in a Pumpkin (1834) or Okroshka, Meat (1891) but I would pick up something more reliable for those recipes instead. The main value of the book is its overview of the history and food in it, as well as an attempt to explain that there is more to the cuisine than caviar for the rich, and cabbage for the poor.
\n(at least there is Doktorskaya somewhere in between)
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