desperance (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
desperance) wrote2015-01-22 05:56 pm
desperance) wrote2015-01-22 05:56 pm
Heat, applied and theoretical
For the record: ten pounds may be slightly too large a batch of Sevilles to marmalade comfortably in my stockpot. For ten pounds of oranges demands ten pounds of sugar, plus the water of boiling thereof, plus the cheesecloth-wrapped innards of the oranges (I might have said offals); and it may only be that this only happened because I am sick and was not paying attention, being under a cat at the time and engaged in conversation with m'wife, but the pot overboiled and there is burned marmalade-syrup on the stove and ain't that going to be fun to clean up?
Talking of which, even after three years of living here and five years of visiting, I still carry English habits to this American stove. Like I expect the oven to divide between hot (at the top), medium (in the middle) and cool (at the bottom), and it just doesn't. Its efficient construction means that it is more or less equal-tempered all through; and yet I continue to shift things up or down in expectation of hotter or cooler, and it really doesn't work, and stuff gets burned at the bottom and fails to sizzle freely at the top, and *sigh*...
(In an interesting side-note, I find that an unstirred pot of boiling marmalade can vary by ten, fifteen, even twenty degrees F. from one spot to another. Once stirred and homogeneous, it is always disappointingly not as hot as I wanted.)
Talking of which, even after three years of living here and five years of visiting, I still carry English habits to this American stove. Like I expect the oven to divide between hot (at the top), medium (in the middle) and cool (at the bottom), and it just doesn't. Its efficient construction means that it is more or less equal-tempered all through; and yet I continue to shift things up or down in expectation of hotter or cooler, and it really doesn't work, and stuff gets burned at the bottom and fails to sizzle freely at the top, and *sigh*...
(In an interesting side-note, I find that an unstirred pot of boiling marmalade can vary by ten, fifteen, even twenty degrees F. from one spot to another. Once stirred and homogeneous, it is always disappointingly not as hot as I wanted.)