Pork soup

The day in question started with a visit to the health centre for an RSV jab. Which, despite my being bad with injections, was fine, with the nurse so arranging things that I barely knew that she was doing it. Back into town for a spot of shopping at Waitrose: grapes from Peru, white cabbage from Lincolnshire and mushrooms from the UK, not further specified.

The grapes were large and red, Allison from Peru. They may have been invented by the SNFL people at reference 1, from where the snap above is taken. With grapes described in the following terms: 'very late season red variety with large crisp flavoured berries allowing extending the red grapes season. Large size bunch with high productivity. Very good condition after 6 weeks in storage trial'. They were, as it happened, very good grapes, and maybe they have been especially bred to survive six weeks storage in good condition, which would, I suppose give them time to get from a Peruvian farm to a Waitrose storage facility in England. Maybe even by ship if they step on it and the Panama canal is still open - but my money is on air freight.

According to the fact sheet, available nearly all year round, with just a two month holiday for (our) summer. Maybe we can make do with other stuff then. Maybe, even, English cherries.

SNFL appears to be a subsidiary of the Amfresh of reference 2, a Spanish fruit conglomerate which started out with citrus and remains strong in the world of fruit juice.

AM Fresh UK Ltd - No.04526463 - is probably a relation. It is certainly in the fruit business and the upper echelons are very Spanish flavored. The snap above is taken from a forty page company account for the year ending end August 2023. A private limited company with annual revenue of £300m. Which seems rather a lot, so maybe they do rather more than just red grapes from Peru.

But I have failed to find a corporate website which gets beyond the marketing gush of reference 2. Perhaps, as a private company, they don't have to bother with any such thing.

The good news is that both Bing and Google take one straight to the company when I use '04526463' as a search key. But are they cheating with prior knowledge of my recent search history? Perhaps not, as Google seems to be able to perform the same trick on my Samsung telephone - which I don't suppose is linked in a relevant way to my laptop. But you can't really be sure these days, not unless you work for Google.

Anyway, back home with my shopping, got cracking with the pork soup, putting 6oz of pearl barley in three pints of water at 16:00. Brought it to the boil and then turned it back to simmer. Added celery and onion a little later. A bit more than half a pint of extra water (two small Beryl tea cups' worth) and 400g of pork tenderloin at 16:45. White cabbage and a small amount of left over potato at 17:20. Mushrooms at 17:28.

Odd how black the grapes look in the snap above, but I am sure that they were actually red. The scissors next to the grapes were inherited from MIL and FIL; much better quality than the tools that FIL usually bought, so I don't know how he came by them. Jumble sale? Hospital disposal? Maybe BH will remember.

And, although I say it myself, the soup was really very good, going down as well as any pork soup that I could remember. We did about two thirds of it at this first sitting.

PS 1: in the margins of this post, I find that Schiehallion, a mountain in Scotland that I climbed perhaps thirty years ago, in the the middle of the summer, is made of quartzite, a metamorphic form of sandstone. A hard rock, but not as good as flint for knapping. And not a volcano, rather shaped by glaciation, and famous for its participation in the second measurement of the weight of the earth in 1774. Sadly, the French beat us to it in 1738 - but at least their measurement was not very accurate.

A little to my surprise, I find that the original paper is readily available at the Royal Society, with the first page being included above. Call at reference 6 for your own copy.

A paper of some 43 (quite short) pages, which ends, appropriately for a Royal Society, with a royal puff. I don't suppose they bother with that any more.

What I have not yet found is the the value for the weight (or perhaps density) of the earth that he came to.

PS 2: I was pleased to find that Google is not yet all knowing. Image search on the snap above only turned up images of the same sort. He was not able to trace it to source. That said, he gave a lot of space to snaps from Johnson's dictionary of 1773, which I thought was a pretty good guess. And he does even better on the first page.

References

Reference 1: https://snflgroup.com/.

Reference 2: https://amfresh.com/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiehallion.

Reference 4: https://www.scottishgeologytrust.org/geology/51-best-places/schiehallion/.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiehallion_experiment.

Reference 6: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1775.0050. An Account of Observations Made on the Mountain Schiehallion for Finding Its Attraction - Maskelyne, N. - 1775.