First tea. From time to time my tea, particularly first thing in the morning, has been having a most unpleasant taste. We decided that there were a number of possibilities. The hardness of the south London water. The water taking up an unpleasant flavour from the kettle - evidence in favour of this one being that we once had a holy-rolling neighbour who was convinced that plastic electric kettles, at that time only recently invented, did this. The brand of tea bags. Something wrong with the (semi-skimmed) milk. Failure to rinse the soap out of the tea cup (actually a mug) properly when washing it up. One might think that a concerted programme of experiments would have rapidly got to the bottom of the matter, but that did not seem to happen. However, the present theory, not disproved for a couple of weeks now, is that leaving boiled water in the kettle and then reheating it, some time later, is to blame.
We also think that the unpleasant brown film which often develops on the surface of the tea and is then apt to stick to the side of the cup is probably down to the hard water and nothing to do with the unpleasant taste - despite the unpleasant appearance. Doesn't happen when we are in Devon, where the tea, incidentally, has a quite different flavour.
Second scones. From time to time the tea time (cheese) scones do not rise properly. Again, there were a number of possibilities. Dough handled too much or rolled too much. Too much or too little liquid. Wrong sort of liquid, that is to say too high or too low a proportion of water in the milk. Scones rolled out too thin. Too many scones to the tray, thus slowing down their cooking, which might affect the rise. Wrong sort of cutter, crimping the edges too tightly. Was it the wrong sort of cheese? Was the real problem the fact that either the cheese, or the milk, or both had taken passage through the freezer in the garage? All sorts of possibilities, and in this case, as we do not make scones that often, we have not yet got the bottom of the problem.
In fact, we drifted onto a quite different problem, the problem of the provenance of our scone cutters, old enough to be made out of regular steel rather than stainless steel or plastic. Did they date from our marriage or did we take them over from one or other set of parents? Then there was the complication of which cutters had handles. I certainly remember using a cutter of the sort we have now when I was a child. But dredging around in other fading memories, we think the answer is a mixture. Most of our present set of cutters date from our marriage, but one of them came from my mother's kitchen. Then, as now, 85% of the use is cheese scones, 10% is mince pies and 3% is other. For example, jam tarts. The balance of 2% is a margin for error.
From where it occurred to me that maybe we had stumbled on the origin of some of our odd craft customs. Once one has got something, for example making a date and walnut cake or planting broad beans, to work, you get your apprentice to do exactly as you do. With no attempt to be clever and work out which of the many and varied steps are actually necessary and which are not. With the result that, with drift over time and over the generations, some large part of what is done might come to be quite irrelevant to the outcome, but quite essential to the ceremony. The apprentices must never get the idea that they can play fast and loose with the protocols handed down to them or who knows where things will go. They must stick with what is handed down.
From where I associate to a story about pumpkins, brought to my attention a couple of weeks ago. A certain sort of pumpkin decided that it needed its seeds to be dispersed a long way and that large herbivores were the way forward. So the pumpkin added a poison to the mix, enough to deter small herbivores, like mice, but not enough to bother large herbivores. And all was fine and dandy. But then there was a mass extinction or something - perhaps it was the Yucatan hit (see reference 1) - and all the large herbivores in area in question disappeared, and with them the vehicles for long way dispersion. The pumpkins have struggled on, are still producing the poison and are still deterring the mice. But presumably without the success that they once had. Not helped either, I suppose, by the arrival of humans who have messed around with the ecosystem in other ways.
A nice example of evolution not always getting it right. Or, if you are of that persuasion, the divinity not always getting it right. Or at least not bothering with non-essential maintenance. For the full story ask bing - or google - about 'gourds and squashes cucurbita spp adapted to megafaunal extinction and ecological anachronism through domestication'.
Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater.
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