The end of the pork

At breakfast yesterday, I took the last remnant of a recent pork feast in the form of gravy on bread, garnished with a little chou pointu. Loosened with a little fresh water.

The gravy was second edition gravy, made with butter, black pepper, flour, onion and the high grade stock left over from the first edition. Ben had been generous with his pork bones.

Given that I was not getting any colour from the roasting tin, I thought that a few drop of Sarson's gravy browning was in order, last noticed at reference 1. On this occasion, I remembered that it is powerful stuff and only added a drop at a time.

It turned out very well, with this being its third and last outing.

Reference 1 reminded me that the active ingredient of the gravy browning was ammonia caramel, aka E150c, about which I had asked Copilot. So clearly time to compare and contrast with what Gemini has to say today, snapped above. I have not checked line-by-line, but it looks to be a slightly longer version of the same story. I have not gone so far as to check whether they used the same source or sources and what exactly those sources were. Another day.

Readers are advised that, after some considerable time at them, I have decided to take a short break from social media, after which I shall return with the full story of the pork feast.

In the meantime, I did notice the story about soup at reference 2. Noticed because my mother, raised in Canada, was fond of Campbell's chicken noodle soup and we used to have it as part of the light meal we called tea, taken at around 17:00. As I recall, two tins of condensed soup, cut with some real milk, did the six of us. I, at least, have got more greedy since then.

I associate to the boss of Ratner the jeweller being silly enough to rubbish his own products at some trade conference, a rubbishing which made it to the mainstream media. He left the company to pursue other interests shortly afterwards. And the company folded.

Checking with Bing, I find this is not quite the while story. The boss's other interests turned out well enough and Ratner morphed into Signet, which at one point had lots of shops here and elsewhere, particularly North America. Now pushing more into online. Odd that, for a successful company, I don't think that I had heard of them before: at least, I do not remember the name. See reference 3.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/09/chicken-dinner.html.

Reference 2: Campbell’s fires executive who criticised its food in recording: Vice-president of IT department alleged to have told a former employee the company made food for ‘poor people’ - Gregory Meyer, Financial Times -  2025.

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