Warm Recollections #22
More from the Bitz Files
As introduced here, these Warm Recollections are random cullings from thirty years of notes files…
Interesting fact: if you dream during a night when you have an oncoming hangover, or a current cold, you don’t dream yourself thus afflicted. I’ve woken to find myself surprised and dismayed to have one or the other. You may have bad sleep because of them, in which case you’ll be semi-awake and feel like shit and be aware (or become aware) of the reason why, but if you get good sleep, and dream, you’ll dream yourself as okay. Your dreaming self is neither hungover nor cold-ridden. Why? Is it a self wholly free of the body and its malaises?
Weak tea is worse than no tea at all.
Many recipes are nonsensical these days. Say you’re making a butternut squash chili. 500g of squash is meaningless: what makes sense is ‘half a squash’ or ‘a whole medium-sized squash’. The cook of the old days — having made the dish many times before, and probably watched their mother making it too — then adds other ingredients based on their experience of the proportions required, bearing in mind a known and understood end result.
You see this with real chefs, and experienced home cooks — everyone else is doing this weird measuring thing that actually mitigates against cooking, in the sense of understanding foods and flavors and how the ingredients work together. Which is why dishes like roasts (“Slather with seasoning and/or herbs, then put in an oven about the temperature of a real fire and leave it there until it tastes right”) are so pleasing to cook, and to eat.
Things happen because of place as much as they happen because of people.
As a novelist you spend a lot of time thinking ‘How do I get from here, to there?’ — when you’re not really sure where ‘there’ is, and you also know how arbitrary it is that you’re ‘here’, too. It’s like building a house out of mist.
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Squashes are impossible to peel. If what you have in your possession is an unpeeled squash, I strongly advise that you move house rather than deal with the bloody thing.
Love "building a house out of mist". It goes neatly into my mist file together with two fun facts:
1. In the 1960s Rolls Royce planned to bring out a RR Silver Mist until their German agents told them that "mist" is German for dung and Rolls Royce Silver Horseshit probably wouldn't sell too sell.
2. When mist becomes fog is apparently 1km away. So if you can see a kilometer ahead it's still mist.