Two reviews
Oct. 8th, 2007 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjMovie review: The Jane Austen Book Club
When they come to write the dictionary definition of "chick-lit chick-flick" (try saying that quickly), this movie should feature somewhere prominently. I mean that in the nicest possible way. The basic premise is that a group of (female) friends put together a book club as a distraction for one of their number whose husband has just dumped her for another woman. The numbers get filled out by shanghai-ing a wistfully disgruntled high-school French teacher who is teetering on the brink of cheating on her skip-a-trip-to-Paris-for-a-ball-game husband with a student, and a sensitive new-age computer mogul who attends sci-fi conventions and bicycles to work. They set to work going through all of Jane Austen's novels in sequence against a backdrop of standard romantic comedy angst and shenanigans. We know that we're in chick-lit fantasyland because by the end of the movie all the men have come around, seen the light, and not only have become attached, reattached, or more solidly attached (or, in one case, showed up in the last minutes solely for the purpose of having become attached) to the appropriate women, but they have all also joined the book club and learned the delights of literary analysis. Not that I'm knocking the romantic potential of literary analysis, mind you. The sole exception to this orgy of heterosexual wish-fulfilment is the sixth member of the book club, the dumpee's lesbian daughter who goes through two perfectly nice but apparently disposable girlfriends in the course of the movie and is the only major character left unpartnered at the end of the movie. Needless to say, this left me disgruntled. On the whole, it was an enjoyable movie, as long as you don't expect any greater level of plausibility than any other romance -- or, for that matter, than Austen's novels themselves.
Recipe review: Apician laurel-cooked pork
I cut some branches off the laurel tree Saturday to provide greenery for the decorations for Teresa's funeral. And, as usual, once I get to cutting, I'm no longer in "cut enough for the purpose" mode and have shifted into "my, this tree needs pruning" mode. So I had a whole stack of laurel branches left over and decided to try another variant of this recipe.
Aliter in apro: aqua marina cum ramulis lauri aprum elixas quo usque madesiat. Corrium ei tolles. Cum sale, sinapi, aceto inferes.
Boar, another way: boil the boar in sea water with sprigs of laurel until it is tender. Take off the skin. Serve with salt, ustard, and vinegar.
I've tried this recipe several times and have yet to be disappointed. My interpretation of the basic recipe is:
In a pot, prepare a brine roughly equivalent to sea water and sufficient to cover a 2 pound pork roast. Add several handfuls of fresh laurel leaves. Place the pork on top of the leaves and simmer, covered, until cooked. (Ca. 60 minutes.) I usually use a boneless shoulder roast and it ends up meltingly tender and thoroughly infused with the laurel flavor. I often skip the part about a sauce. The one thing is that the brine makes it too salty for some folks' diets and seems to be an essential part of the chemistry of the process.
So this time I thought I'd try something new. I took a clean cloth large enough to wrap the roast and covered it completely with an overlapping layer of fresh laurel leaves then sprinkled it slightly with coarse salt. I put a 2 pound pork tri-tip roast in the center and rolled the cloth around it. Originally I thought I'd have to tie it up, but the cloth held everything in place by itself. Preheat the oven to 450 F, put the roast in and reduce heat to 350 F then roast for ... well, based on Joy of Cooking it should have been about an hour, but I'd stuck a meat thermometer in the roast and maybe my oven's going wonky again but it was over 2 hours before the internal temperature got into the safe zone. So go with internal temperature.
The process worked equally well as boiling to get the laurel-infused flavor, and the salt level was much more reasonable. Problem is, the meat was a bit dry and not as tender as usual. I think this was the choice of cut -- I'd gone for the tri-tip because it was lean, but the leaner meat combined with the drier cooking method seems not to be optimum. More experiments are necessary. (Darn.)
On a previous occasion (although not this time), I accompanied the laurelled pork with another Roman recipe that is only practical if you have an endless supply of fresh laurel leaves. The original comes from Cato's De Agricultura as quoted in the footnotes on p.169 of Flower & Rosenbaum's Apicius: The Roman Cookery Book. I don't have the original Latin this time:
Sweet-wine cakes are made as follows: moisten 1 peck of wheat flour with must. Add aniseed, cumin, 2 lb. of fat, 1 lb. of cheese, and some grated bark of a laurel twig; shape and place each cake on a bay-leaf; then bake.
Flower & Rosenbaum note that the quantities reduce to 1 lb. flour to 2 oz. fat and 1 oz. cheese. I reduced this to:
Rub 1 oz. lard into 1 c. flour and stir in 1/2 oz. grated hard cheese.
Grind 1/4 tsp anise seed and 1/4 tsp cumin seed and add to flour mixture.
Moisten to a paste with wine.
Wash and dry a dozen or so large fresh laurel leaves. Brush lightly with oil.
Divide up the paste into as many pieces as you have leaves and flatten it out to cover the leaf.
Place on a baking sheet and bake at 350 F for 15 minutes or until slightly browned.
(Serve on the leaves but you don't eat the leaf!)
The effect was something like the little cheese pastries that my mom used to make for us with leftover pie crust when baking pies. Tasty, but a bit rich for more than a garnish. In the original context in Apicius, wine cakes are mentioned in the context of another pork recipe where some of the sauce for the pork is poured over wine cakes (but no recipe is given for the latter, hence the recipe supplied from Cato).
When they come to write the dictionary definition of "chick-lit chick-flick" (try saying that quickly), this movie should feature somewhere prominently. I mean that in the nicest possible way. The basic premise is that a group of (female) friends put together a book club as a distraction for one of their number whose husband has just dumped her for another woman. The numbers get filled out by shanghai-ing a wistfully disgruntled high-school French teacher who is teetering on the brink of cheating on her skip-a-trip-to-Paris-for-a-ball-game husband with a student, and a sensitive new-age computer mogul who attends sci-fi conventions and bicycles to work. They set to work going through all of Jane Austen's novels in sequence against a backdrop of standard romantic comedy angst and shenanigans. We know that we're in chick-lit fantasyland because by the end of the movie all the men have come around, seen the light, and not only have become attached, reattached, or more solidly attached (or, in one case, showed up in the last minutes solely for the purpose of having become attached) to the appropriate women, but they have all also joined the book club and learned the delights of literary analysis. Not that I'm knocking the romantic potential of literary analysis, mind you. The sole exception to this orgy of heterosexual wish-fulfilment is the sixth member of the book club, the dumpee's lesbian daughter who goes through two perfectly nice but apparently disposable girlfriends in the course of the movie and is the only major character left unpartnered at the end of the movie. Needless to say, this left me disgruntled. On the whole, it was an enjoyable movie, as long as you don't expect any greater level of plausibility than any other romance -- or, for that matter, than Austen's novels themselves.
Recipe review: Apician laurel-cooked pork
I cut some branches off the laurel tree Saturday to provide greenery for the decorations for Teresa's funeral. And, as usual, once I get to cutting, I'm no longer in "cut enough for the purpose" mode and have shifted into "my, this tree needs pruning" mode. So I had a whole stack of laurel branches left over and decided to try another variant of this recipe.
Aliter in apro: aqua marina cum ramulis lauri aprum elixas quo usque madesiat. Corrium ei tolles. Cum sale, sinapi, aceto inferes.
Boar, another way: boil the boar in sea water with sprigs of laurel until it is tender. Take off the skin. Serve with salt, ustard, and vinegar.
I've tried this recipe several times and have yet to be disappointed. My interpretation of the basic recipe is:
In a pot, prepare a brine roughly equivalent to sea water and sufficient to cover a 2 pound pork roast. Add several handfuls of fresh laurel leaves. Place the pork on top of the leaves and simmer, covered, until cooked. (Ca. 60 minutes.) I usually use a boneless shoulder roast and it ends up meltingly tender and thoroughly infused with the laurel flavor. I often skip the part about a sauce. The one thing is that the brine makes it too salty for some folks' diets and seems to be an essential part of the chemistry of the process.
So this time I thought I'd try something new. I took a clean cloth large enough to wrap the roast and covered it completely with an overlapping layer of fresh laurel leaves then sprinkled it slightly with coarse salt. I put a 2 pound pork tri-tip roast in the center and rolled the cloth around it. Originally I thought I'd have to tie it up, but the cloth held everything in place by itself. Preheat the oven to 450 F, put the roast in and reduce heat to 350 F then roast for ... well, based on Joy of Cooking it should have been about an hour, but I'd stuck a meat thermometer in the roast and maybe my oven's going wonky again but it was over 2 hours before the internal temperature got into the safe zone. So go with internal temperature.
The process worked equally well as boiling to get the laurel-infused flavor, and the salt level was much more reasonable. Problem is, the meat was a bit dry and not as tender as usual. I think this was the choice of cut -- I'd gone for the tri-tip because it was lean, but the leaner meat combined with the drier cooking method seems not to be optimum. More experiments are necessary. (Darn.)
On a previous occasion (although not this time), I accompanied the laurelled pork with another Roman recipe that is only practical if you have an endless supply of fresh laurel leaves. The original comes from Cato's De Agricultura as quoted in the footnotes on p.169 of Flower & Rosenbaum's Apicius: The Roman Cookery Book. I don't have the original Latin this time:
Sweet-wine cakes are made as follows: moisten 1 peck of wheat flour with must. Add aniseed, cumin, 2 lb. of fat, 1 lb. of cheese, and some grated bark of a laurel twig; shape and place each cake on a bay-leaf; then bake.
Flower & Rosenbaum note that the quantities reduce to 1 lb. flour to 2 oz. fat and 1 oz. cheese. I reduced this to:
Rub 1 oz. lard into 1 c. flour and stir in 1/2 oz. grated hard cheese.
Grind 1/4 tsp anise seed and 1/4 tsp cumin seed and add to flour mixture.
Moisten to a paste with wine.
Wash and dry a dozen or so large fresh laurel leaves. Brush lightly with oil.
Divide up the paste into as many pieces as you have leaves and flatten it out to cover the leaf.
Place on a baking sheet and bake at 350 F for 15 minutes or until slightly browned.
(Serve on the leaves but you don't eat the leaf!)
The effect was something like the little cheese pastries that my mom used to make for us with leftover pie crust when baking pies. Tasty, but a bit rich for more than a garnish. In the original context in Apicius, wine cakes are mentioned in the context of another pork recipe where some of the sauce for the pork is poured over wine cakes (but no recipe is given for the latter, hence the recipe supplied from Cato).
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Date: 2007-10-09 03:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-09 05:53 pm (UTC)