The Secret to French Gastronomy

A Short Monologue on Cooking and Fire by
GP duBerger

Simple; Pan of stewing beef with ground pepper and laurel leaves garnish on top.
The fire is placed on minimum setting.

If you're anybody like me; setting fire to the kitchen is something normal. Everything you cook on the stove burns or you forget to turn the stove on, and your food establishes its own thermal equilibrium with the Universe. I only tinker with HTML Markup, and most of it is canned HTML 4.01; or I get into trouble writing about the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics and rant about how bad is modern science, I can imagine what it must be like for those who write computer code. I'm the kind of person, who in the winter when the curtains are drawn, will look at the clock and ask; Is that A.M. or P.M.? This was becoming a problem, when it became apparent that my cats were coming to see me when something was ready on the stove and they'd take shifts too. In their feline way of explaining things to humans, I learned to acknowledge where and when danger lurked. Don't get me wrong, I've had floods too and in those instances, the cats sought a place of refuge instead.

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From Mad Magazine XL #10 July 2001
Fair Use

Let's not forget that I forget, often, to turn on the dishwasher that's already fully prepared, and I forget to take frozen food out of the freezer for later preparation, and all these to-do things I think about while I'm sitting on the can, where I'm completely helpless to dash off and do these important things.
I'm writing this, too, while my site is being bombarded with spam (Redirect: Referral) so this little diversion about cooking is very welcome. I shut down my site in key areas and am now using this as an opportunity to tone down my sarcasm, in some of my articles that I direct towards the particle/theoretical physic's community and cosmologists. It's a daunting task to debunk/disprove You Tube scientists, especially when a meaningless term such as "awesome" is now part of the scientific lexicon. Apparently I hurt these precious darling's feelings. The Ph.D. from Minutephysics included a portrait of himself, or his lover, in the beginning of one of his videos; looking very manly after I called him a post-pubescent who should be chasing boys and/or girls, at his age, than talk about Relativity on You Tube.

Thank you, but I'd rather hear it discussed by someone with grey hair and/or with some wrinkles who has given that subject, among others, a lot of thought which only Father Time can provide.
He should of placed a portrait of his posterior instead, so that I could imagine giving him a swift kick in the behind, which is what all these intellectuals deserve for creating a world that must die and have even invented a system to rationalize their mistakes that make them appear as inevitable anyway.

Any young person with a Ph.D. on You Tube or any of the networked medias that don't work on real issues into science that concern the future (The environment is one example) and not describe things my grandfather could of told me just as well, is not a scientist but a little boy playing scientist. The world does not need the HD version of old things that have already been very well documented. I mean, who cares how the Universe was created, or how old it is; Let's talk about tomorrow instead, besides the apocalypse — that, I think, is more important otherwise it is all programming, which is fine if you are a machine but not for the living .

Then all of a sudden, all three big channels on 'You Tube science' start showing videos on thermometers or heat and energy and tell us what the Universe is all about — Again, where all I'm doing is talking about Matter and cold or matter's cooling capacity rather than heat capacity and how they can achieve much of the same work producing potential and more if combined with sustainable methods and measures. I don't care what you talk about; There is no work done, from any machine anywhere, that has not managed this through achieving some sort of equilibrium with an open system. So I mean what's the big deal? They have their universe, I have mine and I have already achieved my goals with readers who are actually listening. I don't know what all the huff and puff is about since they only know about me through referral links anyway, which says much about how they do their research. I'm not competing with them because I dislike them, especially snot-nosed intellectuals who are still wet behind the ears.

When my treatises and iconoclastic monologues 'Extreme Cold' and 'The Principles of the Laws of Thermodynamics' series get republished, they will be a Mark 3 version with tons more facts and evidence and will lean toward a more artistic philosophy that should create a significant interest in Matter, for anyone to understand, or I may be even be more vicious; I haven't decided yet, and besides I don't want to bother with the scientific community anymore, especially those from You Tube or any mass media in general. The only ones I watch now are 'The Periodic Table of Videos', and only if Professor Poliakoff is discussing something I'm, interested in and NASA/JPL, who have nice friendly engineers doing the narration, whose low key enthusiasm and pride in their work is genuine and infectious and the Nobel website sends me, once a month, some interesting stuff sometimes.

Anyway, on Videos they showed on You Tube about heat and thermometers (while never mentioning 'The Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics' but only the Second Law), they neglected the most important historical fact about thermometers; it is that they are the first significant scientific apparatus to be inserted into body orifices and cavities, and the tighter the orifice, the more accurate they were, especially when there is no "wind" in the vicinity.

"Blah, Blah, Blah".

The 'Flying Beef' into the fork.
This is how restaurant menus should look like today where customers are handed tablets instead of cardboard.
8 to ten 10 hrs later, on a very low fire, after adding tomato paste, water, potatoes and green onions.
Hummm! Next time I'll try the "Flying Pork into the fork" or "The leaping chicken" and use disinfected bird feathers from a pillow as decoration!.

Well I think my stew is ready to eat now. Hmm! looks good! Look! It's so good the beef, all by itself, is flying right into the fork and falling off because it's so tender and juicy and not the other way around! What new scientific phenomena await us? The last time I saw a wonder such as this, was with the 'Cheese-haunted Fridge' affair back in the eighties, where my sister, coming back from France, brought home the stinkiest, most foul smelling and horrible French cheese that could be imagined and that was still moving around too. So, this cheese still being quite active and obviously upset over its 6 hr. flight, made noises in the fridge and moved thing around inside while I supposed it was smoking Gauloises in the darkness because I saw something emanating from that poor fridge.
It is then I learned the secret to French Gastronomy. No food will be served or eaten until it's brought back to life.

One thing I did learn is the benefits of slow cooking that can turn the simplest things into extraordinary things. I can only hope to attain to some similar principle in my life. For now, it serves to protect my kitchen from going on fire and my cats can come over and see me for new reasons.

GP duBerger

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