99 YEARS OLD AND STILL WORRIED ABOUT SIZE...
LAST weekend I decided to continue my preparations for National Vegetarian Week by making a loaf of focaccia bread which I would cut into chunks and stuff with slow-roast beef or smoked salmon to ensure that I was eating enough dead animals to make up for the misguided efforts of those pasty-faced people who had been lured onto the vegetarian way.
I had never made my own focaccia before, so was diligently following a recipe which, as seems always to be the case when making bread, left me deeply puzzled at one particular moment. That moment arrives after all the mixing and kneading when the instructions say, as they always seem to do, “leave the dough until doubled in size”. Sometimes they advise leaving it in a warm place; sometimes they advise covering it with oiled cling film or a cloth but recipes always seem to use that “doubled in size” expression.
What, I always wonder, do they mean by “size”. Are they talking linear dimensions, or area or volume? It makes a huge difference. If our original lump of dough is 10cm in diameter, for example, one could easily take the instruction to mean that we must wait until it is 20cm in diameter – but then its volume will be eight times the original if it retains the same shape. To achieve twice the original volume, we would only require an increase in diameter to 12.6cm (as 1.26 is very close to the cube root of 2).
On the other hand, “doubled in size” could mean “doubled in apparent size” and since the impression of an object that appears on our retinas is twodimensional, we would then be talking about the area, not the volume of the proved dough, which would require an increase of the original diameter to around 14.1cm.
An additional problem is that the shape of the expanded dough tends to be somewhat flattened compared with the original, and I cannot imagine how the average cook is expected to compare the “size” of the oblate ellipsoid with which they stared, with a flatter expanded version, without the use of highly sophisticated equipment or advanced mathematics.
The problem of bread, in that respect, is rather like that of Islington. Several years ago I saw a report of “an asteroid the size of Islington” which may or may not have been heading for Earth. The asteroid, I mean, not Islington. Mercifully it seems to have missed us but the description still worries me. The size of an asteroid is in general described either by its diameter or its volume (or its mass, which is a function of the volume). Islington, however, is an area. How one can compare its size with that of an asteroid is a mystery, particularly in the absence of any legislation telling us how deep the territorial rights of London boroughs extend.
The standard unit of area is, in any case, “An area the size of Wales,” or, if you use metric units, “An area the size of Belgium,” with three Waleses roughly equal to two Belgiums. Where Islingtons, asteroids and bread loaves fit into that is anyone’s guess.