Chronomatics

Julia Child on diversions and variations on the adage of the watched pot.

Timing: Tripe is far from being a fast-food operation. It needs soaking, and simmering, and the long slow cooking — 5 to 7 hours or more, depending on your recipe — in which it gradually absorbs the flavours of the wine, onions, spices, and any other ingredients you have put with it, and all the while it is developing a marvelously savoury taste. I don't know why people shy away from a 3-hour dough rise, a 5-hour simmer, or a 12-hour oven session. You are not sitting there, eyes glued to the pot. No! You are out at the movies, or you are writing your novel, or you are playing tennis, and you return to your tripe when its time is due. This is, really, the easiest kind of cooking, where, once you've put it all together, it does the rest of the work for you.

From Julia Child's Kitchen

And so for day 2308
08.04.2013

Sunwards Sandwards

Concurrent reading makes certain passages glow more. Take for example Stewart Brand's The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (advertised on its cover as "The Ideas Behind the World's Slowest Computer") still fresh in mind when encountering these lines from Richard Howard "Colored Stones" in No Traveller.

(WISCASSET)

Braided black and white, the waves repeat
or imitate the rocks of Pemaquid;
these are the interferences of quartz
with granite, some archaic violence
garish as light on water. Stone to sand,
sea to sun, identical returns.

Identical in cycling but different in duration. In any event, the observation of the resemblance between the action of grit upon grit and the evaporation of water is neatly summarized in the motto: Stone to sand; sea to sun. Ah, now I see how the parallel is askew. Metonymy introduces a slippage. Sand and sun are not mere equivalents. This is not solely about the phenomena of erosion and evaporation. There is a turn of the cycle that is intimated but unstated: sedimentation. Sand turns to stone just as water returns. Long now indeed.

And so for day 1417
30.10.2010