Listerham

Could be a mid-sized market town in Norfolk? But no, it is rather a rant from me about the mysterious transformation whereby thinly slicing food quadruples the price paid by consumers. A couple of weeks ago, Dau.II foodie sans pareil had day release from Dublin to help her agéd parents with some domestic task. She has hank when she poured off the train at Plunkett Station and we had to repair instanter to a supermarket for the makings of a hang sangwich. Nope, LIDL ham would not answer, we must go across the way to Supervalu for a packet of Brady's Family Ham . . . a  Stafford's turn-over Ingredients Wheat Flour, Yeast, Water & Salt. I buttoned my lip, because Dau.II, as a child, could get hangry and I had no wish to witness the adult version.

But my inner dialogue was to the effect that LIDL ham was quite likely made in the same factory with pigs from the same farm injected with NaNO₂ from the same vat.

Then on the last day of June, the food-safety authority FSAI issued a Listeria recall directive on

• Brady Family Wood Smoked Real Irish Ham 6 Slices €37.40/kg
• Brady Family Hand Crumbed Real Irish Ham 6 Slices 
• Lidl Deluxe Triple Oak Smoked Carved Irish Ham 5 Slices 
• Lidl Deluxe Honey Roast Carved Irish Ham 5 Slices 
• Tesco Finest Crumbed Shaved Ham 16 Slices €20.75/kg

all with a bbd of 16 July 2026. I rest my Lidly=Brady equivalency case! You do you, listen to the radio adverts, and buy Brady Family Ham at €37 per kilo. In a hangry emergency I might buy the same stuff in a yellow pack from Lidl or Tesco. But really, I'druther can a [half] kilo of uncooked ham for €7/kg, b'ile it up and cut generous tranches for a week's worth of lunches. Can't be piffling about with waffer-thin slices of honey-shaved wood-roast hand-carved over-priced product.

It could be worse for Brady's rep. It's "only" Listeria!? [whc bloboprev] Unless you're pregnant, very young, very old or undergoing chemo, you'll get through the infection with some fluid loss [both ends] and some discomfort. And (this is important) the contaminated batch was detected by routine in-house QC at Brady. Accidents and boo-boos will happen in any institution; if the errors are detected, then nobody dies. I hope the recalled ham gets chopped up for soup; it would be a shame and a waste otherwise.

By coincidence, the day before the recall, Wikipedia featured On this day the 1971 case where Bon Vivant tinned Vichssoise avec Clostridium botulinum killed one, disabled one people. "On July 3, Bon Vivant voluntarily recalled all remaining cans of their vichyssoise, including soup manufactured under 22 different private label brand names". The FDA came down all heavy and Bon Vivant went bankrupt. I hope Brady's weather the storm because they employ a bunch of people in Co Kildare and are tuned in to Food Cloud, the no-food-waste charity. 

Mission Custard-possible

In the run up to Christmas, I was tasked to "Get custard, Dunne's Own will do", so I did; indeed I bought 2 cartons because who's counting?. Turns out we didn't need custard over Christmas but pies were made in January and soon enough both cartons had been consumed. As old people with better than average discretionary income, we don't have to behave like impoverished students anymore: when the choice was either a Christmas tree or one bottle of Ruffino chianti. This last Christmas, in a crowded and getting crowdeder Dunne's stores, I snagged 2x Dunne's Own TetraPak Custard which was piled high-and-deep beside the dairy section. With better quality control, less stress, and 20/20 hindsight, I would obvs have bought Dunne’s Sweet and Creamy Fresh Custard [as R] instead . . . at 6x the price but what the heck it's Christmas. Here's the price + ingredient data comparison:

Ingredient	Bird’s Tetra	Dunne’s Tetra	Dunne’s Fresh
Such much?	€6.00/kg	€1.00/kg	€6.00/kg
Milk, skimmed	✓	✓ Reconstit	✓ Irish
Buttermilk	✓	✓ Reconstit
Cream			✓ Irish 10%
Sugar	✓	✓	✓
Water		✓	✓
Starch	✓ Modified	✓ Mod maize	✓ Mod maize
Palm oil	✓	✓
Milk Powder	Whey	✓	✓
Flavoring	✓	Natural	Vanilla
Guar Gum			✓
Rapeseed Oil			✓
Carotenes	✓	✓	✓
		Paprika	Exhaust. GVB

Apart from the price, Bird's and Dunne's tetrapak custards look very similar. Dunne's save transport costs at some stage by shipping in powdered milk and buttermilk and reconstituting it with factory-local water.They also bling up the carotene colour with a few drops of paprika extract. Dunne's Fresh otoh go patriotic with Irish skimmed milk and a good jolt of Irish cream (rather than by-product bulker buttermilk). And none of that furrin [and ecologically disastrous] palm oil. Although the rapeseed oil is not Irish there is less of it than in Tetrapak Palmland. I guess the guar gum [a stabiliser found in ice-cream and other processed foods] compensates for rapeseed oil's food-engineering deficiencies. And it's also got "Exhausted Ground Vanilla Beans" which sounds a bit like roadkill.

Another late entry in the custard stakes [I'm not going to rejig my table!] is Avonmore Luxury Fresh Custard - which apparently we did eat at Christmas. It is yet more pricey at €7.00/kg and doesn't have guar-gum or palm oil: (Milk; Cream (34%); Water; Sugar; Skim Milk Powder; Modified Maize Starch; Natural Colour (Mixed Carotene); Flavouring; Vanilla Beans). Gotta say that sounds worth the 18% €xtra in the fresh custard stake.

But heaven-a-mercy how hard can it be to, like, make custard from a carton of last-forever* Bird's custard powder? For starters it has waaay fewer ingredients: Maize starch; Salt; Colour (Annatto = Norbixin); Flavouring. If you follow the instructions (heat 2 tbsp of powder, ditto sugar and a pint of milk) it comes in at ~€1.60/kg: more expensive than Dunne's Tetrapak at €1.00 but much cheaper than branded or fancy custard. Still cheaper if you're think you're on minimum wage in your own kitchen and add the 5-10 minutes extra prep [mix mix stir stir heat heat] time. [* for some definitions of forever: I made up a generous double portion of Bird-dust-cust from a container marked Mar 2023 - it was fine]

Purists can make 'custard' using corn-flour at €2.60/kg rather than custard powder at €8.10/kg but that will only bring down the cost to ~€1.30/kg for an off-white sweet paste the consistency of custard but the wrong colour and no vanilla notes.

It's been a while, but I've done many prev of these food engineering ingredient comparisons - Mince Pies -  Cakes - Pot pies - Powdered milk - Pizza - Tarte au Chocolat - Sausages - Sou'wester cake - Spice burger.

Heart of Darkness

John McGahern has been aired on The Blob because banned for scandalizing the theocracy which was running Ireland at the time. He was not the most prolific of the pantheon of Irish writers but his short list of novels sold well [if not in the Republic]and won literary prizes. I've read a few; coming back for more even though they tend to black-dog rather than pink-fluffy. Djerzi, one of my oldest pals came to stay for a tuthree days and he insisted I read McGahern's 'Memoir' which was published 20 years ago. We're both a bit institutionalized so I can obey orders. Our local part-time mini-library had a copy, so I added Memoir to our pile of something for the weekend and sacked out for most of a rainy Sunday to read it.

McGahern grew up in Co Leitrim, the oldest of a family of seven created by a school teacher and her Garda Sergeant husband. She contributed sparkle, ideas, cookies and unconditional love; he contributed the starting teaspoonful and a pervasive bullying sense of his own importance. The family would have been larger if the poor woman hadn't sickened and died, from breast cancer, when she was 42 and John/Sean was 10.  Even before the mother died, the household supported a succession of young girls to help with the children and housework. Boys were never taught how to sew on a button, let alone how to get ingredients together and cook a nutritious meal. After the mother's death, the Help was required to step into her place with assistance from any girl-childer as they became competent (before their time in a foreshortened childhood?). The rest of their childhoods were endured in the Garda Barracks in Cootehall [R].

I'm a generation younger than McGahern and grew up in a different country. When I was 6/7, my sister and I attended a primary school in Portsmouth. Towards the end of the one academic year we spent there, I boasted that I had never been beaten. Aha hubris, in that final fortnight, for trifling transgressions I was hit with a stick, by an adult, on five (5!) separate occasions. Over the next 12 years until I was old enough to vote [in 1972] that form of punishment was completely scrumpled up and thrown away . . . in England. The McGahern siblings witnessed the normal [cripes! for some definitions of normal] round of beatings in school. Some teachers more depraved than others. But at home they were subjected to savage beatings with slaps, fists, sticks . . . a shovel - by their father. They protected each other as best they could and got to read the room and act together to minimize the unpredictable unstable assaults.

McGahern the writer spend the rest of his life trying to understand, and excuse, and come to terms with the psychic destruction lashed out by the damaged savage who engendered him.

Many years later, he goes to visit with the longest-serving of the Helps. "Katie's husband was over six feet, slow and sure of movement, remarkably handsome and strong; he belonged to that generation of men who had no consciousness of their good looks other than as a form of strength". Which says much more about McGahern than the man he's just met for the first time. It's a [clunk clunk] feature of the book that the narrator wants us to know if such-an-one is symmetrical or not. I don't look in a mirror from one year's end to the other, but I know men who do: maybe assessing people's value as function of how attractive they are is part of your normality. But for me, at this point in my development as a human, it's [clunk clunk] with frankly racist / sexist /otherist overtones.

Another quote "She was walking with us past Brady's pool and Brady's house, and the house where the Mahon brother's lived, past the deep dark quarry, and over the railway bridge and up the hill past Mahon's shop to the school".  One of McGahern's (more attractive) stylistic devices is to use this sentence repeatedly through the book. As if in old age he is playing and re-playing a silent home-movie clip of the together times before Loss flushed the happiness from his young life.

The John McGahern Barracks is a community voluntary project - tours, archives, hot-desk hub and seminar rooms. Barracks, like for soldiers? Last week.

Disappointment calendar

In the 1990s, for several years, I made an Advent calendar for Dau.I and Dau.II. This required printing out two identical pages of 160gsm card covered with 24 randomly scattered rectangles. On the back sheet, I used the rectangles to frame 24 age-appropriate, ironic pictures [ZwartePiet ☻on the 5th; tools 🛠 on the 7th; Rudolf's nose ⬤ on the 9th; a menorah 🕎 on the 15th; a parcel📦on the 24th]. On the front sheet, I cut 3of4 sides of each rectangle with a craft-knife and then covered the whole thing with a holiday themed picture. Dobs of glue were put between the rectangles on the back sheet and especially round the outside edges and the two sheets pressed together. It was shoddy, shonky and crafted with love. Valuing my time at the minimum wage, each calendar was 'worth' ~€60 yoyos. Somewhere, there is an archive of these unique objets d'art for some definitions of Art.

Sometime in the second week of December 2025, there came into our possession a Kinnerton [who? about] Advent Calendar [as L]. I understand that Bluey is a TV doggonality which might be attractive to kids the same age as Dau.I & Dau.II were when I made Advent Calendars for them. Not all modern parents [or aunties?] value their time but some do and and so they buy an Advent Calendar: a snip @ €4.95. The Kinnerton Calendar front has far better production values that my home-made kludges but the rest is deeply disappointing: the 24 (35mm x 40mm) doors cover a 6 x 4 blister pack, each cell of which contains wafer of chocolate [by some definitions of chocolate] the size of a toe-nail. I kid you not, each door hides 1.7g of matter. The total edible part weighs in at 40g or 1½oz in old money.

"Our Safe Nut Promise means that you and your loved ones can enjoy delicious moments reassured that we really care about our products totally nut-safe". In this case, say one moment is < 2 seconds. Then you're paying €5 for ~one minute of  deliciousness. Or €300/hr - suddenly my home-made advent calendar is looking like Value!

Or to put it another way, this food adjacent product retails at €125/kg. More than 2x the price of insect health bars or in other blobwords cheaper than bayleaves but more expensive than nutmeg. 

Ingredients [did we say No nuts? we did in FI DK NO SE as well as English]
Sugar, Vegetable Fats (Palm, Sal, Shea in varying proportions), Dried Skimmed MILK, Dried Whole MILK, Cocoa Mass*,  Emulsifier (Lecithin), Vanilla Flavouring, *Rainforest Alliance Certified.

Fear not! The Blob has your back on Sal Shea Palm vegetable fats. Whatevs, today is Christmas Eve, last door for most Advent calendars!

Grow your own; make your own

Last year local libraries handed out packets of seed. I pre-planted the beans and peas in 4cm micropots to be germinated under the sofa. But I couldn't be dealing thus with spinach; so I cleared 1 sq.m. inside the polytunnel; lurried in a few buckets of compost; broadcast the spinach seed; and raked them in. In a couple of weeks, the weeds were back in numbers but the spinach came up as well; and I had to water c a r e f u l l y lest the wispy seedlings were carried away in the flood. Since then, for the whole of July and half of June that spinach has kept on giving [R below for one day's harvest]. [R above] is the too-small-to-pick abundance left for  another day. It's true, however, that I often hand-pick a sandwichful for lunch.

I never wash own-self-grown salad leaves because I know there is no coliform in that part of the garden; and who wants wet leaves in a sandwich?? In contrast there's been another national recall of contaminated produce: this time spinach (and rocket, mixed leaves). The only advantage of _buying_ fresh picked greens is that there's a chance they are packed in nitrogen which will (until opened) protect the product from spoilage much better than a bag in the salad drawer of my fridge.

I say another national recall of contaminated produce because we had one also involving Listeria just two weeks ago! That was at the value added end of the food chain in Ballymaguire Foods up in Lusk, Co Dublin/Fingal. If you've ever eaten a chilled 'ready meal' in Ireland [Aldi, Centra, Supervalu, Tesco] chances are it was made by Ballymaguire, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hoey Family at Country Crest Ltd. The Hoeys used to grow and sell spuds but, like Keogh's Crisps, worked out they could do better by processing produce and now have 400 on the payroll. This recall list  gives some idea of the cross-contamination possibilities:

• Bolognese with Pancetta
• Chicken & Chorizo with Baby Potatoes
• Goose Fat Irish Potatoes
• Ham & Mushroom Tagliatelle
• Irish Angus Beef Meatballs with Pappardelle
• Mashed Turnip or potato [€6.50/kg "gluten free"]
• Potato Gratin
• Rainbow Root Vegetables
• Salmon Penne Pasta
• Three Cheese Cauliflower Bake
• Veggie Lasagne
• Wholemeal Pasta Bolognese

You can buy organic potatoes for less than €2/kg, so getting them mashed by strangers for your family is [€4.50!] costly . . . even without dicing with Listeria.

make your own? An earlier Me might have expressed amazement that adults in 21stC Ireland couldn't mash their own potatoes, let alone construct a basic chicken pie. Last year we went through a jag of buying and eating Aldi Deluxe Special fancy pot pies. They were tasty [food engineers know their onions] even if they had 30 different ingredients. Well obvs home-baked pies would likely max out at ~10 different ingredients, so convenience isn't about limiting the inventory in your pantry. My judgey gripe is imaging the cliché office worker unable to cook because they're exhausted from pounding the keyboard all day. Really? Not all office workers! but I reckon some of them would live longer and happier lives if they cared about food prep and did it well rather than shirking it as an invidious chore. 

I confessed this a tuthree days ago when I was having lunch with Cookie Dau.II. She invited me to check my privilege. There are far too many people living in B&B hotel rooms with no chopping board & only a microwave for cooking. And cohorts of elders living alone but not eligible for Meals-on-Wheels. And folk with the palsy or registered blind. I accept that, but I suspect there aren't enough such edge cases to justify a whole industry processing food for profit. The business model depends on healthy, fit, people who can afford the price of convenience and choose not to donate that discretionary income to people who cannot.

One result of eating a few dozen Aldi pot pies in 2024, is that I have a stack of those dinky aluminium foil dishes. For me it is the work of minutes to make a batch of short-crust pastry, enough for a week's worth of pies, say, Mo We Th. There is a good bit of Lebanese genes culture swilling about in the family: many of my rellies are unable to stop over-catering for The Unexpected Guest. There is always something to fill a pie in a left-overs tupperware tub in the fridge. The example [R] contained an interesting mix of brown lentils, green beans, red onion, beige garbanzos, with a smidge of diced chorizo.  It's probably more efficient to take a leaf out of Hoey Inc's playbook and assemble a batch of pies all at once - say a half dozen, not a half tonne. They'll keep a few days as >!Shazzam!< convenience in the fridge and much longer in our freezer rather than Aldi's. Pricewise, I'd guess the mark-up between my pie and Ballymaguire pie is about the same as for mashed potato. And any contamination from sloppy kitchen practice will just be asymptomatic family-own-self coliform. I wouldn't serve Uncle Dan from Canada one of my pies - his microbione is a different, susceptible, kettle of fish altogether.

I don't know any specific cases but it's Lombard Street to a china orange that some of 'my' Food and Ferm microbiology students from my working days in The Institute finished up doing QC for major food producers in Ireland. I reckon they're better at doing Gram--stains from production line samples now than when they were on my watch. 

Just a perfick day

♬ ♪ ♫ Lou Reed ♫ ♩ for background.

Back in the days when letters were sent & stamps were purchased, I visited A Lot of post-offices; from the GPO [Cúchullain! 1916!] on O'Connell Street to the sub-post office at the back of Greene's Bookshop round the corner from work in TCD. There was a marked difference in service culture among these several stamp-vendors. I developed a theory that sticking dingy sub-post offices at the back of a shop and a long way from natural light bred a service of sighs - surly tending to snappy and officious. Not all post offices!!

The 1915 vintage Post Office, with its classical facade just up from the river in Bagenalstown was worth the visit: a little cramped but with big windows and many nice architectural details. The Beloved claims she sometimes drove straight through Borris PO [crabby postmaster] to send a parcel from B'town. These premises were shuttered many years ago and the PO moved to the back of a petrol station at the very edge of town. The Old PO grew increasingly forlorn and shabby. Last year, it was reborn as The Old Post Office Café. "Welcome to The Old Post Office, a café with a stamp of history." (ark ark)

We knew nothing about this until Dau.II announced that she was incommming for a couple of days midweek. Driving between Aldi and the Library before the train arrived we noticed a new paint job and the menu-board on the pavement. There was a scheduled 0900-1300 power-cut back home and we intended to take Dau.II-the-Foodie off for lunch; why not check out the new place? And it was so. Turns out there is an enormous hall down some stairs behind the old PO counter. Apparently, this was also the telephone exchange for the whole of County Carlow. The Art Deco door is still in place and the new owners salvaged  the 1970s vintage [complete with Dymo labels] plywood post-sorting pigeon-holes [R]: Presentation Convent; M.Connolly & Son; Meat Packers; District Hospital; Corries Cross; Newtown . . .now used for misc condiments.

Unlike some members of the party, I had eaten breakfast before leaving home and at 11.30 it was a long way from lunch; so I ordered a scone and flat-white. The others went full-metal brunch. A hockey-puck is only 3in across: my scone was ⌀ 50% bigger . . . a leetle dry but comes-with two butter pats, whipped cream and strawberry jam. The brunches arrived in enormous soup bowls with close to a kilo of spuds, egg, tomato, black-pudding etc. over beds of wilted spinach. Had to deep-six thoughts of starvlings in Gaza. 

We got up burping and waddled back to the car. Next destination Altamont Gardens which we had intended for lunch. We went for a walk there [OPW free in! parking all-day €2] instead. All the way down to the R. Slaney through the formal arboretum, past the duck&lily pond and back again. It's lovely and there is a café and shrub-shop. 

We were heading for Altamont because it was adjacent to Malone Fruit Farm on the N80. Dau.II was determined to make a batch of strawberry jam. I checked their webpage to see if they had strawbs for sale and they did . . . at a very reasonable €6/kg frozen. When we rocked up, it transpired that their webpage was frozen in time (Copyright © 2013 Malone Fruit Farm): frozen fruit was actually €13/kg!!  This makes it barely economic: 5 pots of jam for €15 ingredients [fruit, sugar, lemon] not including labour. But Dau.II's position is that, in contrast to all other varieties, shop-made strawberry jam and home-made are noticeably different in quality.

Anyway, when we eventually got home, power had been restored and we were ready for a nice cup of tea.

Red Herring

Colloquial Inglês: 
What's that got to do with the price of fish? Used when someone says something completely irrelevant to the conversation.
red herring: something that misleads or distracts from the relevant question. The jury is Out on whether Shagsper had any interest in fish or angling. But it is clear that Shaxpere's contemporaries had an interest in eating fish. Clear? How? Wot am ur evidence?

Clear because of the existence of Familiar Dialogues 1586 by Huguenot emigré Jacques Bellot who had been baffled by the colloquial English of costardmongers and drapers and resolved to write a phrasebook of English, French and English-as-she-is-spoke. These dialogues are familiar because they revolve around the antics of a cliché family arguing in the kitchen and out and about trying to purchase food and clothing. You can get the whole text in three columns on Project Gutenberg. I am annoyed with myself that this was completely new to me when it was posted on MetaFilter in May: niche lists involving foreign languages - c'est ma confiture. As often with MeFi, there is some interesting comments. Thereby, fo one example, I learned that a sheep's gather is/was equivalent to a chicken's pluck: liver + heart + lungs = the basic ingredients, with oatmeal, of haggis.

Mais revenons nous a nos poissons. It's all very well for quasi-bilingual foreign johnnies in 1586 to be comparing notes about what was on the fishmonger's slab but what are we to make of the available chowder-fare 440 years later. It's the perennial problem of using common names with all their ambivalence of meaning and regional variation [see Flora previa]. For future googlers, I here share my Linnaean findings. 

English            French         Linnaean
Soles              Des soles      Solea solea
A good plaise      Vne bonne plis Pleuronectes platessa
Viuers             Des viures     ???
Rotches, Gornettes Des rouges     Chelidonichthys cuculus
Whittinges         Des merlenc    Merlangius merlangus
Waisters           Des huistres   Ostrea edulis
Thurnebacke        De la Raye     Raja clavata
Smeltes            De l'eperlenc  Osmerus eperlanus
Redde hering       Du hareng sor  Clupea harengus
Whitte hering      Du hareng blanc Clupea harengus (salt)
Shrimpes           De la creuette Palaemon serratus
A loupster         Vn hommar      Homarus gammarus
Crabbes            Des escreuices Cancer pagurus
A picke            Vn brochet     Esox lucius
A pickerell        Vn brocheton   Esox lucius (small)
A millers thumbe   Vn gouion      Cottus gobio
A saumond          Vn saumond     Salmo salar
A lamproye         Vne lamproye   Petromyzon marinus
Elles              Des anguilles  Anguilla anguilla
A dorey            Vne dorée      Zeus faber
A makerell         Vn maquereau   Scomber scombrus
A trouette         Vne trouite    Salmo trutta
Smal lamproyes     Des lamprions  Petromyzon marinus
Moskels            Des mousles    Mytilus edulis
Cockelles          Des coques     Cerastoderma edule
A tenche           Vne tenche     Tinca tinca
A carpe            Vne carpe      Cyprinus carpio
Kempes             Des pimperneaux Anguilla anguilla
A whale            Vne ballaine   Balaenoptera acutorostrata

I think I'm correct‽ Fight me in the comments. "Rotches" could be the fresh water roach Rutilis rutilis but I think it's more likely in the context to be gurnard. I was baffled by "Waisters" until I looked at the french huisters or, as she is wrote today: huîtres where the âccent is the trace of the lost "s". Still baffled by "viuers" or in modern orthography vivers. A viver is apparently a stew-pond but here seems to be the inhabitants, so it's likely some sort of carp. As for "A whale" I've taken a punt with Balaenoptera acutorostrata, the minke whale, the smallest of the baleen whales. Although at ~10m long, it would be a good old heft to get that up from the Thames to Billingsgate fish market. The mystery fish pictured at Top? Clue.

More? In my trawls I came across Fish-eating in ancient Greece. Edible fish categories beyond the Linnaean taxonomy at academia.edu [behind sign-up wall]. Like me they have tracked down some ancient writing about the availability of fish in the market and tried to work out exactly what folks were eating 2000 years ago.

Demotic chemistry

Tim James and The Blob are in the same business - spreading Science to The People. When I worked at The Institute, I generally embraced classes with a performative joy; to convince first myself and then the students that science was fun as well as being important. I won't have won over everyone in the room all the time because humor is quirky and sometimes misses the mark. Also jokes fall flat if you try too hard, or become dull if the script gets repeated too often. 

Mr James was a secondary school science teacher in Ipswich UK with an internet presence, who has written an explanatory book El⁸⁷ E¹⁰ Me⁴⁹ N²² Ta⁵ L⁶² How the Periodic Table Can Now Explain (Nearly) Everything. It's okay, and might be an appropriate gift for a youngster who isn't in Mr James's 2nd Year Chem Class but is having the curiosity leeched from their soul by an earnest dullard. But it might be a better book with a more ruthless copy editor who knows when to leave a joke in and when to cut the casual "I'm down with the kids" language. I have a rush of empashame because I know I fall into being too clever-by-'arf too often. One arresting turn of phrase may be funny; two such in the same sentence is merely confusing.

You can see what poor authors have to deal with by noting the different covers for the UK and US editions. The publishing world is where graduates from The Arts Block go to make a living. The joke of making a mock periodic table on the cover was a bridge too far for the US publisher who has kept the squares, coloured them irrelevantly and added some stock photo thumb-nails to make it look relevant to the contents. And who oh why, did they allow N²² to do through when everyone knows nitrogen is N⁷

Thus Chapter 7 Things That Go Boom explains explosions by referring to quantum chemistry and the orbitals of electrons. It's hard to make explosions exciting on paper when The SlowMo Guys do it on camera. But it is the natural place to talk about Alfred Nobel and his Prizes. "The prize money is substantial, numbering in the millions, and it comes from Nobel's estate built entirely on dynamite. Not literally, obviously. That would be stupid." There's a good joke in there, but as written it clunks. A real stand-up for science [calling Dara Ó Briain or Eddie/Suzy Izzard] would work harder on their patter because fewer words makes bigger bang (boom-boom). Later on the same page " . . . one nitroglycerine particle will react with another to produce a bunch of gases, mostly carbon dioxide and water." That a bunch of is down with the kids speak and superfluous. Tighter is crisper. But what do I know? Mr James no longer has to teach science to spotty youth, because he's done well enough as an writer to leave England and make his living in America as author and screenwriter.

America? Not to be confused with Tim James of The Chemical Free Body a Portland-based Woo Movement to help Bowel Movement: We are a mission-based organization that is passionate about helping everybody ignite their highest excitement in life by putting themselves and their health first. Our goal is to rescue one gut at a time with honest, pure and natural ingredients that taste great, and absolutely no harmful man-made chemicals, no binders or fillers, just pure concentrated nature! poo to that!

Pedantic, obsessive me applauds the idea that every one of the 118 elements is mentioned at least once in the text. This is not a text-book, and makes no claims to being a comprehensive romp through the periodic table. But it's also scrappy with dangling anecdotes like the relating bones of Clara Immerwahr's 1915 suicide without giving her any background - luckily The Blob supplies that. But maybe that's okay. It may spark some curiosity, which will drive further reading, and maybe a critical comparison of sources and some skepticism about "Facts".

Sniping aside, I stand by my assessment that this book will help more 13 y.o. [girl]s think that science is interesting and amusing enough to keep on with chemistry and physics at school. Unless they roll their eyes right out of orbit at the punny Brittese language.

Pot pies and fishcakes

IF I only food-shop in ALDIDL, which is more or less true, THEN I'm not going to develop craves for PopTarts or instant Boeuf Wellington. Although I have to report that LIDL's trim little frozen beef-and-stilton or mushroom&tarragon pies are wel lekker. They are also Deluxe and €3.00 the pair. That's €7.50/kg, which is not potato prices, not even block-cheddar prices, but cheaper than chips.

As I say, these things are tasty and make the centre piece of a supper with, say, green beans and boiled spuds. The reason they taste okay is because food engineers have been working into the night lurrying in the umami and mouth feel. Mainly ensuring that the pastry is crispy when the interior gloop is piping hot. Ingredients are hard to find on the interweb, so I'll here get them into the public domain.

30% mushrooms, wheat flour (WHEAT flour, calcium carbonate, iron, niacin, thiamine), water, vegetable oils (palm, rapeseed), water, salt, emulsifier, mono- and di-glycerides of fatty acids, fried onions (onions, sunflower oil), whipping cream (Milk), white wine (sulphites), mushroom stock (concentrated vegetable juices (mushroom, onion), salt, rapeseed oil, water, mushroom powder, sugar, cornflour), modified maizer starch, garlic purée, yeast extract powder blend (yeast extract, salt), whey powder (Milk), chives, salt, 0.1% tarragon, thyme, dried glucose syrup, Milk proteins, colour: carotenes.

Antient YT foodie Graham Jenkinson agrees!

Fishcakes? To give parity of esteem to Aldi, a shout-out for their {cod | haddock | salmon} fishcakes on special (€2.49 €1.49 the pair = 270g) at the end of February. I couldn't find them in B'town but picked some up the following Monday in Carlow. Like the pot-pies, these are fine in a multiple ingredient sort of way; they look a lot better cooked than in their soggy breadcrumb chilled counter state.

Multiple ingredients? yup:

ATLANTIC SALMON (Salmo salar) (38%) (Fish), potato, wheat flour (Wheat flour, calcium carbonate, iron, niacin, thiamine), water, rapeseed oil, white sauce [double cream (Milk), water, salt, lemon juice concentrate, fish stock (water, potato flakes, concentrated fish extract (Fish extract, salt), salt, cod powder (Fish), lemon juice concentrate, onion powder, anchovy purée (anchovies (Fish), salt, sunflower oil)], cornflour, onion powder, ground white pepper], dill, extra virgin olive oil, maize starch, yeast, paprika, apple cider vinegar, salt, sugar, Wheat gluten, black pepper. 

DYED SMOKED HADDOCK (Haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus) (28%) (Fish), salt, colours: curcumin, paprika extract), potato, Wheat flour (Wheat flour, calcium carbonate, iron, niacin, thiamine), HADDOCK (Melanogrammus aeglefinus) (10%) (Fish), water, rapeseed oil, potato flake, double cream (Milk), Cheddar cheese (Milk), whole milk (Milk), chives, extra virgin olive oil, maize starch, salt, yeast, paprika, apple cider vinegar, sugar, Wheat gluten, fish stock (Fish stock, salt, maltodextrin, yeast extract, onion powder, celeriac (Celery), rapeseed oil, leek powder, carrot powder, white pepper, bay), Dijon mustard (water, ground Mustard seeds, spirit vinegar, salt), concentrated lemon juice, cornflour, onion powder, black pepper.

I like that the food engineers at Aldi have deferred to actual cooks in the experimental kitchen, the tasty bits in these two products are quite different: haddock calls for celery, salmon for dill - who knew? And of course I am impressed that they have Latin-named the species - except in the case of cod powder and anchovies. God know and who cares about what goes into "cod powder", presumably it's what's left after all the fillets have been taken away and has been rejected in the fish goujon factories. Anchovies otoh are interesting taxonomically because there are several species in the genus Engraulis. I reckon that nobody who eats cheap fish-cakes would notice if Aldi replaced E. encrasicolus [euro-anchovy] with E. anchoita [Argentine a.] or E. japonicus if those stocks are more robust this year.

Tacit is the word

In the run up to retirement 3 years and 4 weeks ago, I was quite insufferable about how I was boarding the ice-flow to make my desk available for a younger, fitter, hungrier teacher who would be a more attainable / realistic role model for young [female] scientists. The standard [tired]  response to my posturing was to ask "what about your experience? isn't that valuable?" It is, of course, because in doing the same old, same old, for many years, you get better at doing it. Up to a point, Lord Copper: teaching is only partly about content / syllabus / curriculum but also about the process and the delivery. Enthusiasm for / in / about the process is more inspirational than the stuff taught.

And it's probably true that this meta-curriculum a) cannot be assessed b) cannot be described even if it c) can be reproduced. Good teaching involves a lot of perceptual learning: stuff that the teacher internalises by feedback but might have difficulty incorporating in a lesson plan. This was one of the annoying fatuities of having to work in place that was sold on documentation and paper trails. If I wanted to claim mileage for driving off campus on company business, I had to secure prior appro from my Head of Department; who needed the appro of the Head of School; who needed to send the paperwork up two further layers of bureaucracy. Having completed the off-site work, I had to [✓] complete [✓] another [✓] form [✓] and send it up the same trail.

To start a new course required a mire of forms itemizing Learning Outcomes [LO] and Assessment Methods [AM] and Deliverables [D?]. The forms and applications had to be scrutinized by officials and committees of officials. It was no wonder that so many of my colleagues were still teaching the same old tried-tested-boring labs year after year. The prime LO here for students? B o o o r r r i n g!

I'm not sure where that-all came from! Sorry. What I really wanted to flag was another sort of Tacit Knowledge inspired by this article Chicken Sexing for coders which treats of embedded knowledge that you build up over years on the job. You know what's crap even if it takes a lot more effort to demonstrate why something won't work.

"Near the end of my internship, we found that we had too much work to do and too few engineers to do it with, so I was asked to code a set of API endpoints on my own. I completed my task and asked a senior engineer to look at my code — he walked over, glanced at my controller file, and said “Oh, that’s not good, this would be a problem later. Structure it this way. It was less than a few seconds at most, scrolling through the hundred or so lines I’d written". 

I saw the same thing occurring at every lab meeting I attended when I was close to the cutting edge of science. [Before I settled down to teaching farmer's daughters and pharmacy technicians the rudiments of biology and maths]. At those lab meetings, some youngster would present their latest research, often at a loss to explain why things were not going well. The Gaffer would suggest new directions; (2 or 3 years) older lab-members might chime in with technical detail and Presenter would be able to go forward a bit less bowed. It might be years since The Gaffer had put on a lab-coat in anger but the tech details were usually less important than the approach, the mindset and the crap-detector.

Yesterday I had another encounter with tacit knowledge / embedded experience. Dau.II may have left home again but there are still elements of hungry chick in our relationship. While occupying the sofa, she had an insatiable appetite for Knockroti the pastiche of chapatti which I've slapping on the stove for the last 20 years:

These used to be how I would use up any bits of bread dough which were surplus to the weight required to make a 800g or 1200g loaf-pan loaf. Years ago, I promoted an old cast-iron fry-pan for this sole purpose. Because, I only used it for off-cuts, I didn't really get the process embedded in muscle-memory. I can remember making a big fuss when the two crusts were separated by steam power and the chup puffed up "Fußball!" I'd cry auf Deutsch out and turn to my family for approval. 

We're going up to Dublin today and yesterday I was requested and required to make as many K'roti as I had patience for, because m'chicks had almost emptied their freezer of chupplies. On it! You can see the first 8 Fußballen of the batch. It's rare now to fail in the desired separation of the two crusts . . . because some barely conscious part of my 'mind' knows the ingredients, temp, timing to achieve this aim.

Bere

A swatch of my family spent August up in Ullapool in Scotland. All the under-30s went on a day trip crossing The Minch Skotlandsfjörð to Stornaway, Lewis out in the Hebrides. They were hoping to see whales but were disappointed in that; although none of them lost their lunch - so that's a win. The CalMac schedule only left them ½hr in Stromness - enough to run up to touch the Town Hall door; but not time to snag a scotch pie from The Big Bite on Point St. Later that week, on the Mainland, they were able to pick up some Scots edibles including a packet of "Highland Crackers, Original Seeded". I won't say that these are better than anything you can buy in Ireland, but they're crisp and not wafer-thin and salty in a good way.

As an intellectual, I am obliged to read the packet, which is often revealing about the trade-off between taste, transport, and shelf-life. Here is the Table of Contents / allergens.

Orkney beremeal (barley flour - gluten) (20%), wholemeal spelt (gluten) flour, wheat flour (gluten fortified with calcium carbonate, iron, niacin and thiamin), butter (cow's milk), Cullisse Highland Rapeseed Oil (10%), linseed (10%), sesame seeds (5%), malted wheat grains, sunflower seeds (2%), malted barley (gluten) flour, ground peppercorns, sea salt, malted rye (gluten) grains, pumpkin seeds. Here's a peculiarity for obsessives: 'tis me who has added the red gluten after wheat. I wrote to the company to suggest that, in the next print run for packaging, they specify the nature of the allergen for each of the four grassy species (barley wheat spelt rye) of the ingredients. And yes, spelt Triticum spelta will trigger gluten intolerance, despite what some woo-folk assert.

Beremeal is flour made from bere [R] a six-row barley Hordeum vulgare grown in diminishing quantities, mainly on Orkney. Bere is adapted for the poor, acid soils of the north and is remarkable for its short "90-day" growing season. 70% of all barley grown on these islands goes to animal feed, almost all the rest is malted for beer or its more potent derivative, whiskey. Barley bannocks used to be the staple food of those who only grew wheat for cash or for The Laird. Bere is mostly ground in The Barony (water) Mill at Birsay. Barley-meal really doesn't hold together as well as wheat flour and weaker gluten means that barley bread is barely riz. I'm glad bere is now getting niche use in these fancy crackers - at £30/kg they are about the same price as smoked salmon.

everlasting paste

We prefer to be exclusive when it comes to food? We'd rather not share our salad greens with caterpillars and snails. And I don't mean accidentally chomping through a maggot when eating an apple; even the tooth-marks of invertebrate sharers brings up <huuack> a feeling of disgust in many consumers. That's what I take from the fact that all the leaves in those nitrogen-packed bags of mixed salad greens are intact and unblemished. An amazing feat of quality control mediated by optical recognition software and the sharp eyes of low-paid assembly line workers. As well as prime delicious looks, we'd also like to have some shelf-life to the product and that's largely due to the nitrogen [no oxygen aNNyway] pillowing up the salad leaf bags.

Dairy is another matter. Because of its packing, we're less worried about things we can see lapping up the cream; it's more abut the microbes - Listeria and Coliforms; Campylobacter spp., Salmonella spp., Brucella melitensis, and Mycobacterium bovis [that would be TB!]. In my dotage, I've started to add cream to the weekly shop: I add a gob of it to drinking chocolate made on hot water when I can't be arsed to make a pot of tea. There's almost always some in the fridge and I use it several days beyond the printed sell-by BB date. My sainted MiL learned to cook in tropical Africa and had to trust her nose and eyes and I am channelling her.

A good few weeks ago an honoured guest brought a shop-bought pie [a rare treat in our make it from scratch home]and a carton of Elmlea double cream.  I've clearly lived a very sheltered life because I'd never 'eard of it. The package looked just like reg'lar cream and Dau.II had to point out that it wasn't. One clue was that the sell-by was months out from the day of purchase.  The pot sat in the fridge for weeks until, at the end of May, Dau.II stopped piffing about, opened the lid whisked up the contents, made some meringues and a rhubarb fool and served it forth in our short drinking glasses. It was fine. But why would you bother to keep the dairy but get the fat from somewhere else?

It's just that, instead of one ingredient, there are ten (10) to construct an emulsion of water, fat, carbs, protein and ADEK vitamins: Elmlea Double: 

• Buttermilk 69%, Vegetable Oils (Coconut, Rapeseed), Lactose, Emulsifiers (Soya Lecithin, Sucrose Esters of Fatty Acids), Stabilizers (Xanthan Gum, Locust Bean Gum, Carrageenan), Colour (Carotenes).
  

Hey look, there's our generic industrial paste ingredient carrageenan [prev]. And that's where all the oilseed rape Brassica napus napus goes! There's A Lot of bright yellow fields this spring growing these Brassica for crushable seed. It's Canola to y'all Nordamericanos.

But the market division at Elmlea realised that they were missing a trick by selling a product that was too close to, like actual, cream. There are loads of consumers who have gone all vegan on us and want nothing to do with exploited farm-stock. Marketing talked to the food engineering division et voilá! Elmlea 100% Plant Double Alternative To Cream. Which has upped the ToC to fourteen (14) ingredients and left not even the whiff of cow behind [poop joke - I'm still 11 at heart]:

• Lentil Protein Preparation (Water, 1.1% Lentil Protein), 31% Vegetable Oils (Coconut, Rapeseed), Sugar, Modified Corn Starch, Emulsifiers (Sunflower Lecithin, Sugar Esters of Fatty Acids, Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids), Stabilizers (Guar Gum, Locust Bean Gum), Natural Flavours, Salt, Colourant (Beta-Carotene) 

The finance department were presumably delirah with this solution because Buttermilk <whoa pricey> has been replaced with 1% lentils in water <commendably cheap>.

And while we're on immortal food products, let's recall the gingerbread church which was made for Christmas last year. We're not generally super-quick to dismantle the paraphernalia of the holidays and that gingerbread chapel is still with us 5 months after it was constructed from food grade products. The coloured windows were made to measure by including crushed hard candy in the window-opening when the walls were baked. They looked really well but sugar is hygroscopic and a little widdle of coloured syrup started drooling down over the window-sill before the end of January.  A few weeks later the gloop was creeping across the snow and finally consensus was reached about a respectful end to the edifying edifice. It's rather too late for going up the chimney as winter fuuuuuel. On the 27th May it was put out "for the birds" but they were not interested. I suggested that the whole thing would be disappeared by "mammals" if left overnight on the coffee table outside in the yard. I was imagining this, The Beloved thought that and the gingerbread came inside again sharpish.

Freebie

Does a bear exploit in the woods? 

Years ago, in grad school in Boston, my boss had two teenage daughters at home. They ate a lot of cold cereal. One day, I was passing through their kitchen and remarked on the purple milk in the bowl. The dye was leaching from the Grape 'n' Raspberry Froot Loops. It was a cue for a characteristically irascible rant at General Foods who would make an out-there new variety of product and budget $1million for advertising and still turn a profit by selling 2 million packets of Avocado Chili Cornflakes at $2 the pop. Even if no cereal packet ever got finished and nobody bought a second packet, because bleugh! And next month another wild option would be kited to consumers of America

The market is skewed because the end-consumers are either children who bully their parents into purchasing what the kids see on daytime TV or youngsters living at home who have a grunt job at a car-wash or McDonalds but no mortgage to pay. Adults tend towards, like, real food.

Dau.I was down for the bank.hol weekend and presented me with an apposite card [R]. She had lifted it, with permission, from a grown-assed chap at work who had been snacking on 'healthy' Bear Yoyos. Bear Snacks was founded in 2009 in the UK and you know that adults [except as commissariat and catering supplies] were not the target demographic; they encourage feedback fr'instance through the following media

• Give us a growl bear.uk@bearsnacks.com
• BEAR,  The Big Cave, Deepest Darkest Woods, PO Box 1311, St. Albans, UK
  

I guess you cannot fault them as a chemical factory of additives. There are very few packaged 'foods' which have fewer ingredients than my sourdough bread.

• Apples (65.8%), Pears (32.9%), Strawberries (1%), Black Carrot Extract (0.3%)
• Apples (40%), Pears (40%), Mangos (20%)
• Apples (62.3%), Pears (31.1%), Blackcurrants(6.6%)
• + each packet includes a 'collectible' card featuring something similar to Bob the Blob [see above]
  

Apart from the performative bonhomie equivalent to children's TV from the 1970s, my gripe is the cost. The standard aliquot is 5 Yoyos [one for each school lunch M - F] each weighing 20g for €3.29 . . . that's €32.90/kg! which surely puts them outside the budget of poor families actually feeling food inflation. I guess ordinary struggling folk by-pass the aisle packaged products promoting "health" and buy, like, actual apples at 10x for €1.60. That's about ¼ the price and includes actual apple pips that you can spit across the lunchroom at your pal Jimmy.

Worst scone in The North

In about 1985 I emphatically threw in the towel on buying bread in, like, bakeries; and started making the family's bread myself. For many years, I bought dried yeast as industrial ½kg tins although recently I've been pitching into Polskie Sklepy on the regular for 100g of fresh. But I wouldn't be Irish if I didn't make soda bread occasionally and I can knock up a batch of scones before unexpected guests have shed their top-coats and galoshes. A key trick I learned from YT a tuthree years ago is to put the dough through several cycles of roll and fold à la croissant: each fold gives an extra loft of lightness.

Croissant?! Hat-tip to Felicity Cloak of the Guardian whose croissodyssey round France I read and reviewed two years ago. Travel books need a trope to hold the narrative together and also a ruthless editor to prune away the boring bits. Cycling (if you have an leather arse) round France (if you have a smatter of french) in search of the perfick croissant is a project with which I could get along.

Starting before Cloak but finishing later - because her project was comprehensive rather than a sample - Sarah Merker [L] has been on a journey to try a scone at every National Trust tea-room in England, Wales and Norn Iron. Anyone finger wagging about the planetary burden of all that excess travel can cast their mind back to 2013 and reflect on their own carbon footprint when Merker started her project. 20/20 hindsight is a piffling talent. Her sconodyssey was picked up by the Press Association as Merker closed in on the last few NT scone outlets. When she finally sat down at The Giant's Causeway, the story was picked up by the Guardian and other media, achieving 15 hours of fame. Really you could think of far worse ways to spend your leisure time. There is a book.

I dipped into this rich confection to taste the State of the British Scone and liked the recipe of logistics, taste-test and local history. But when every scone in the nation seemed to score 5/5, contrary me dug in to find the worst scone in Northern Ireland. Years ago, we were in Avondale House, Parnell's gaff in Co Wicklow, because the grounds are full of fresh air and big trees. It was, literally, grand; but tea-time was a big disappointment because the café had no scones and the yoghurts were 4 days beyond their sell-by - harumph!. It turns out that that the scone at Carrick-a-Rede merits only 4/5 "The scone was unfortunately dry - I don't think it was fresh, but I've been wrong about that before - and the cream helped to alleviate things". Obvs we shouldn't condemn an outlet on a sample size of 1 and 4/5 is 80% or a 1st Class Honours Degree mark. But I'll gripe by proxy at "there was a choice of fruit or raspberry and white chocolate" wot-the-scone!? what ever is wrong with serving a good plain scone [I like a shake of coarse wholemeal in the mix]? It's like when The Fərmentary overcooked a batch of their croissants and confessed they might be able to save and serve by covering them with icing and almonds. The best cooking is not fancy gimcrack; it is simple ingredients in perfick combination.