Pithiviers 1

Pithiviers - a French word for a sort of puff pastry pie with almond cream in it.

I made one.

Stage One Conclusion: not bad, a bit too dark around the edges.
Use less cream mixture next time?
Oven probably a bit hot - I set correct temperature so must be the personality of the particular oven that must be taken into consideration.

Overall impression: pretty OK, for the first attempt! There is plenty of pastry and mixture left so I can make more and improve.

Afterwards-Taste-Feeling: Satisfied.

Asleep At The Wheel

There is a famous song in England. It's a sort of national song (written in 1916 so not very "traditional" yet) and is heard frequently at sporting events (since we have no artistic events in this country at which to hear singing).

The thing is, the words are by William Blake. He was quite good with satire but I'm not sure many people have noticed. Look at what it says:

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land

I think what is happening is that when he writes a question in the text, the common approach is to read it instead as a statement. "Ah, yes, those feet in ancient time walked upon England's mountains green, and also the holy Lamb of God was seen on England's pleasant pastures, etc.

Look at what he thinks of England: it has clouded hills (no Countenance Divine to shine on them here, no divine inspiration). It has Satanic Mills - heavy industry and consequent environmental and human damage. Hmm, so, what does he mean by "England's green and pleasant land"?

He could mean it literally. Fair enough, if so. He thinks England is green and pleasant and so is a fit place to make something good.

He could not mean it at all. England is fairly green, true. Pleasant? This is a feeble word aimed at a mediocre place. Look at the other language - Blake has many words for great things but none of them is weak like "pleasant".

So what does it mean? I think it might mean "England is horrible, please make it better" (to put it crudely). When it is sung I think people intend "England is great, greater than other countries, and will be for ever". So I'm glad that all makes sense (as much sense as usual...)

Probably the main point to make about the song is that nobody means anything when they sing it. It's just words, and all the other nonsense we learnt over the years was made of similar-sounding words, all equally unexamined and repeated like parrots would. And that is what we believe in. Well, I hope none of it comes true. "I made a wish, don't know what it was, but I'm hoping...!" Oh-oh. Could turn out green and pleasant...

Awash With Creams

We have progress on patisserie creams!

No accidents today.

We now have large amounts of crème pâtissière (confectioner's custard) and crême d'amande (almond cream). Time it said it would take in the book: 35 mins. Time it actually took: about 2 hours (long enough to hear Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4 and all the Purcell Fantazias). But now I am well on the way to making Pithiviers, for which I will need the two kinds of cream mentioned already as well as some puff pastry. So it looks like pastry is coming soon.

The custard did not curdle. I cooked it too fast the last time!

Lithuanian

From 1864 to 1904, literature in Lithuanian was illegal in Lithuania. It was illegal to have printed matter that used the Latin alphabet (the alphabet you are looking at now).

I wish I could say this sort of thing was rare, but it has happened lots of times.

Now Lithuania has its own language again. I want to know what they are saying there!

Multiple Disasters

Oh dear. The day started fine, and remained fine until about 8 o'clock. Then it all started to go wrong.

First the crème pâtissière curdled. Then the meringue failed to get beyond the licuid stage - at all! There are reasons for these avoidable disasters which I will relate soon. But the main reason is IT HAS ALL GONE WRONG.

It's not a bad mood, maybe not even a biorhythm problem. It's just a miniature area of turbulence which must be weathered somehow - or zapped away!

My harmony was disturbed, and that's unusual. But it is returning - now I have left the kitchen and abandoned further cooking!

Ah well. Ha ha!

Unwinding

The strings on the piano are tightly coiled and under great tension. It has to be that way to work right. But too much tension and things would break.

The piano is inanimate though. It is not self-tuning.

You are the one who turns up the tension on your own strings.

But things are stressful! I can't help it!

Maybe, but the same things could be taken completely differently by someone else. They could be relaxing! We don't know how exactly, but we know it would be different.

The strings on the piano are tightly coiled and under great tension.

Are yours, somehow?

Good words: unwind, loosen, uncoil, wind down, relax.

Right?

Overstretched

What made me think about Robert Pershing Wadlow was that I happened to notice he was exactly the same length as a Steinway Model 'D'! On the R. P. Wadlow site I linked to, his height is given as slightly less, but I always remember reading that it was 8' 11¾" ("eight feet, eleven and three-quarter inches" for non-English people, or 273.685 cm - about 2.74 metres), which is exactly the same as the 'D'. Funny, hey?

Because of the tightened strings (so as to make the lovely sounds at the right pitch!) that piano is under a tension of 45 373 lb ("lb" means pounds, from the word for weighing scales, libra) or 20 418 kg.

I hope you are under less tension.

If not, perhaps a bath would help?

Hi

The tallest person in history, Robert P. Wadlow (1918-1940), was as tall as most of us when he was 5 years old. He was taller than all of us by the age of 10. When he went to the cinema, he needed five seats, one for his left arm, one for his right, one to sit in and one each for his legs.

He was tall.

He was a person too. But I think he was remembered for his personality as well as his height.

Better that way.

The world is a physical thing, and so are we, but there is more to it than that. It's more realistic to remember what was on the inside - the real inside. I think he would agree.

It's his birthday in 2 weeks.

Updates and Fiddly Work

I made some slight changes to the Secrets of Piano Playing pages.

You know, it's difficult to get exactly the best way to express something, particularly if it is something no-one has said before. Actually, that's something worth writing down, isn't it? I wonder how many books are like that...something nobody has said or known before?

A good book is like that. I'm sure all books have something new in them, some reason to exist. But some try to copy others that were successful before, and those become boring quite quickly. I'm trying to think of all the "airport novels" I've read. These (if you didn't know) are the thick-ish paperback books you see at the airport. They are often thrillers. "Jake Undercarriage was a tough ex-Marine with a passion for antiquities. When he stepped into the Ankara Museum of Egyptian Art one sweltering afternoon, little did he know that soon both sides of his character would be tested to the limit..." and so on... (Yes, I did make that up. Yes, I should be writing Airport Novels. Unfortunately I am doing music and have obviously missed my calling)

You know, I never read one I didn't like. The bad ones I never read, so I can't really say anything about those.I know that some of the ones I read were more imaginative than others. But sometimes you just want to read a book, you don't want to be "tested to the limit" like Mr. Undercarriage. I will happily read one of these books if:

there is nothing else important to do
there is something unique about it like location, characters, atmosphere
it isn't pathetic and empty and just about killing
the characters are realistic - not made out of cardboard
there is fantasy
there is excitement
part of my brain is thinking about something else and I need to occupy the other part to help the first part work

So it looks like I still make some demands, even when it comes to light reading.

For light listening, I like something like Borodin String Quartets. How can there be light listening? Do I not think music is either full of meaning or empty of it? Well, yes, but there are all kinds of different things to learn. If a piece of music teaches me about music, then it is very interesting. If it teaches me about the situation of being alive, then I am happy. If it takes my soul out of my body and blows new air into it then there are no words to say what I am. But if it teaches me about some other part of being alive, if the author says "I was alive too and this is how I felt about it, let's listen together", then if it is nice it might be easier to listen to, or to read. For a rest. To better understand the other things.

I don't know everything about everything I do though. If you are more normal you may be saying "Don't think so hard! Have a rest!" and I think you are right. Sorry, words are about thoughts so it can get a bit thoughtful when you write. But that's why the words have to be right, which is why I revised the Secrets of Piano Playing, which is why I am speaking to you now.

Was speaking to you!

New To Us

Scientists today claimed to have discovered a lost world in an isolated Indonesian jungle, identifying dozens of new species of frogs, butterflies and plants, as well as a bird of paradise thought to have been extinct for more than 100 years.

The expedition also found large mammals hunted to near extinction elsewhere during its rapid survey of the Foja Mountains, in Papua New Guinea. They said that the wildlife was remarkably unafraid of humans.

Two Long-Beaked Echidnas, a primitive egg-laying mammal, simply allowed scientists to pick them up and bring them back to their camp to be studied, said Bruce Beehler, a co-leader of the month-long trip.

news story

The thing about the lost world in the report is that it has been found. And it was there before we found it so it was never 'lost'. But perhaps something here was lost...which we wouldn't recognise now.

Odd Family Food Thing

A sandwich is a light meal formed of two pieces of bread with a filling of meat, cheese, or other food.

A cake is a sweet food often made from a mixture of fat, flour, eggs and sugar, which is cooked until the mixture sets.

OK so far.

What's going to happen next?

Well, you see where it says "or other food" in the sandwich section above? That is the thing we have our eye on at the moment. Because there are a few funny things that have been put in sandwiches over the years. I'm sure I do not know all or even many of them, but I can let you have a few pieces of information from the family archives.

Item One. Sugar sandwiches. I think lots of people have had these in my family. Hmm, sugar sandwiches...don't seem quite right somehow. But he or she who goes for the sugar sandwich goes for it because he or she likes it.

I don't know, have you ever heard of this?

It sounds to me like something that appeared after the war. (Second war, there was another one too, sadly). After the war and after food stopped being rationed and you started being able to get things again, I suppose all that sugar was welcome. After all, the English diet was based on milk, eggs, wheat bread, butter, sugar, tea, pork ham or bacon, jam, that kind of thing plus various pies and maybe some roast beef one Sunday? But the point is, sugar was definitely in there, ever since Britain started capturing places and people where sugar grew (to make it easier to put it in our tea, you see).

Ah well, that's the mystery of the sugar sandwich anyway. Sugar butties is another word for it, because most sandwiches (or 'butties') have butter on them as well - yes, it looks like the sugar sandwich may have had some butter in there, too. This is getting silly!

OK I think I've remembered another one. Ready? OK. Syrup sandwiches.

(Pause)

Syrup means Golden Syrup (a product of the Tate and Lyle company, the same Tate as in London's Tate Gallery). On the front of the dark green tin is a drawing of a lion with bees coming out of him, from a Bible story (The Bible, Book of Judges, chapter 14, verse 14). "Out of the strong came forth sweetness", it says. Interestingly, there used to be something like this in other stories, too. I think it was a bull that, if buried, produced a swarm of bees and the honey that naturally came with them. Because bees were a bit magical. They were separate but somehow lived as one whole. They produced mysterious sweetness. You can see a lot of them on early European art objects. They were sacred to the Mother Goddess, as was the bull. Isn't it odd to see the shape of a crescent moon in the bull's horns too?

Golden Syrup is a thick form of inverted sugar syrup (sugar refined and treated so that the molecules split into fructose and sucrose (or levulose and dextrose, because the molecules bend to the left and to the right respectively, as does light if shone through a solution of them)). So it's sweet, thick, and a bit burny-tasting, though only a little bit burny-tasting.

Anyway, that's what it is, but I don't know at all how it gets into a sandwich. Hmm? bread, sugar syrup? Oh well, we haven't finished yet, there is still one more.

There was something funny about the beginning of this post. Something I mentioned that seemed not to fit in. Well, it doesn't fit in, and here's exactly how it does not fit in. First I mentioned sandwiches, then I mentioned cake. I can do no better, in this brief museum tour of family oddities, than to close with a simple presentation of the most disturbing exhibit of all. It can be told in two words, but none can tell what psychological damage it may do to those who hear those two words. Read on at your peril, because this is it now. This is the end. Two tiny little words.

Cake Sandwich.

All Is Well

Got it. Got it all!

But the keyboard stopped working so I couldn't write to you about it. Oh, Logitech Wrieless Keyboard and Mouse Combination, what is happening to you? I am using another one for now.

It'll be goodbye to the boxes soon as well. Books are going on shelves. Glasses are going in cupboards. Etc.

Got distracted then as I was watching people sitting on a bus. And all the faces of people rushing by on their way to...somewhere where the people rush as well.

It will be very good here. Must try to produce something useful!

Back to work...goodbye for now, faithful ones!