Culinary affairs

Yesterday started off harmlessly enough with my, having run out of breakfast labels of my own to read, reading the labels on the everyday-value marmalade. I was rather surprised to find that 100g of marmalade contained 20g of fruit and 60g of sugar, with the balance being water with with a touch of pectin (to make the stuff set). So marmalade was essentially sugar, moistened with water and flavoured with a spot of fruit.

Digging a jar of rather better class raspberry jam out of the cupboard, I found that that was 50g fruit and 50g sugar to the 100g of jam.

Going into the 'Radiation' cook book, I found these numbers broadly confirmed for home use, this despite my recollection of childhood jam making being that you started with maybe 70g of fruit, 50g of sugar, a touch of water to start the thing off and then boiling it down to 100g. A boiling down which left the copper preserving pan very shiny, suggesting a considerable ingestion of copper during my formative years - much being thereby explained.

I imagine that you can only buy such a pan now if it has had a large hole punched in the bottom to make sure that you do not try to use it.

We moved onto stuffing to go with our taste-the-difference black legged chicken, which did not turn out as well as that on the last occasion (see reference 1). Or the one before that, for that matter.

Postmortemising, we had various thoughts, listed below in descending order of prior likelihood.

The use of crumb from a sour dough loaf was a mistake. Wrong texture and wrong flavour.

There should have been a little less sage and it should have been more finely chopped. I had failed to make proper allowance for the strength of the freshly picked herb.

One egg rather than two meant that the stuffing did not bind properly.

It should have been cooked for a touch longer.

All this notwithstanding, the stuffing was half done by this morning. But we shall give it a dose in the microwave before moving onto the second sitting, thus addressing the fourth point. At least in so far as we can; second cooking is never as satisfactory as first - excepting here the special cases of beans and of chips, which are said to thrive on it.

PS 1: 'more finely chopped' does not sound well. I shall work on improvement.

PS 2: I forgot to mention the cherries bought from Epsom market on Saturday morning at £3 for a kilo or so. Large, dark, shiny red and looked sound enough. But back home it was clear that the shine was not the fresh, clear shine of an English July cherry, rather a slightly mottled appearance when light was reflected off one. And the flesh, while sound and ripe enough, had rather an odd flavour. Most of them ended up in a batter pudding, Probably chiller-freighted from a long way away and to be avoided in the future.

PS 3: stuffing rather better reheated than first time around. All done now.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/stuffing.html.